Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures 9780472118069, 0472118064

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Conventions Chinese words are transcribed in pinyin, Japanese words in the modified Hepburn system used by Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, and Korean words in a modified McCune-Reischauer system. Transcriptions of Korean at times are based on how syllables are written, not on how they are pronounced. In cases where persons with East Asian names writing in East Asian languages list alternative transcriptions of their names, I give both the standard and the alternative transcriptions. In cases where titles of East Asian language sources incorporate words from other East Asian languages, I give these words as they are pronounced in the other East Asian language, followed by their standard transcription in brackets. East Asian names are given in the customary East Asian order, with family name preceding personal name, except for cases of Western-language publications in which the name order is usually reversed. Macrons are omitted over long vowels in the most familiar Japanese place-names; breves are omitted over vowels in the most familiar Korean place-names. Dates for writers and other key figures, many of which are not readily available in English-language scholarship, can be found in the notes and index. I refer to writers by pen name if that name is used more commonly than the birth name. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from French, German, Italian, and Spanish, as well as from modern and classical Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are my own.

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Introduction: Environments, Environmental Ambiguities, and Literatures “We’d like to cut down the trees with nature in mind.” So declared Suzuki Takehiko, director of the Shsenky Kank Kykai (Shsen Gorge Tourism Association), in August 2008. Part of Japan's Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, Shsen Gorge has for decades been labeled the country's “most beautiful valley.” Years of deforesting meant that when the park was founded in 1950, little stood between tourists and the majestic rock formations for which the gorge is most famous. But by the turn of the twenty-first century visitors were frustrated that trees were now blocking much of the view. The park's laissez-faire approach to the valley's vegetation did not threaten its ecosystems—trees are hardly invasive species there. But this economically disadvantaged part of Japan depended on a steady stream of tourists who wanted to see cliffs, not trees; some even claimed that the trees were depriving the valley of its beauty. So Suzuki argued that “trees” (part of nature) should be felled so that people could have a better view of “nature” (the gorge). Despite Suzuki's appeal, most of the trees still stand and in fact are highlighted in the park's promotional materials. The Shsen Gorge Tourism Association's website features images of colorful trees growing beside, and out of, majestic crags; in some pictures trees effectively obscure the cliffs. A banner running near the top of the website declares Shsen Gorge the most beautiful in Japan, full of the [many] wonders of nature Nihon ichi no keikokubi o hokoru “Shsenky” wa shizen no subarashisa ga ippai desu).1 This episode encapsulates what I call ecoambiguity, the complex, contradictory interactions between people and environments with a significant nonhuman presence.2 Many parks, although established at least in part to protect ecosystems from human abuse, ultimately depend on the human footprint for their existence; areas that do not attract visitors risk being developed.3 Likewise, calls to destroy one part of an ecosystem frequently stem from the desire to protect another; deer populations, for instance, regularly are culled so that vegetation can be restored.4 But the ambiguity of people's relationships with Shsen Gorge is particularly pronounced. The original requests Page 2 →for deforestation stemmed from the desire not to save but instead to see another segment of the landscape; tourists wanted the trees removed not so the cliffs could be protected but so they could be photographed. Their calls have gone relatively unheeded; trees remain part of the appeal, their foliage, particularly in autumn, a highlight of visits to Shsen Gorge. Many parts of Japan have not been so fortunate. While some of East Asia's environmental problems have clearly been ameliorated as a result of increased ecological consciousness in the region, others have grown more menacing. In this sense East Asia is no different from most other parts of the world. Few places celebrate ecological destruction, instead giving lip service to “greening” environments, but many promote lifestyles that virtually ensure devastation. Today, the separation between practice and environmental protection rhetoric exists practically everywhere; the divergence is so ingrained it can be taken for granted. Most experts agree that ongoing changes to the world's ecosystems, triggered largely by nebulous combinations of human behaviors and nonhuman processes, are not sustainable and that unless these vectors are redirected, global environmental crises are inevitable.5 At best, our relationships with the natural world are instrumental, regardless of whether we advocate pure preservation or profligate plunder of ecosystems. As Julia Ireland has argued: Such instrumentality is evident not only in the worst forms of environmental degradation such as strip mining, but also in the language behind even progressive efforts at sustainable development. The very way nature comes to appear is already made subordinate to the activity of human beings, who either destroy it outright or feel compelled to manage it. Thus, while sustainable harvesting practices can keep a forest alive, they can never change the deep structures of a style of thinking through which a tree already first comes into appearance as a resource rather than as Dillard's “tree with the lights in it.”6 But instrumentality in many ways is simply a euphemism for an unstable environmental Ponzi scheme or inverted pyramid of epic proportions, one that human history suggests would be nearly impossible to dismantle even if we

really were committed to doing so. As many have argued, we believe, or act as though we believe, that we can demand ever more of the planet, that its resources are so abundant and its biosphere so elastic that it will absorb our increasing effluent with scarcely a trace and provide endless resources with which to create additional waste.7 This thinking and behavior are nearly ubiquitous, but much else remains uncertain, including—most paradoxically— Page 3 →how “greening” or attempting to “green” environments can readily harm them.8 Creative writing on distressed ecosystems does not shy away from this and other uncertainties. Initially I had planned to organize Ecoambiguity around creative treatments of major environmental problems. I had thought of comparing, for instance, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and other literary engagements with deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and (nuclear) apocalypse. After all, we expect area specialists and especially comparatists to highlight cultural and regional differences, differences both among individual (non)-Western societies and between non-Western and Western societies. Separateness often is assumed to be more prevalent, and important, than similarity, not to mention commonality. But the more I read, the more it became apparent that something quite different was at stake. Throughout history people have routinely damaged both proximate and distant landscapes, despite vast differences in cultures, attitudes toward nature, and the resilience of the ecosystems they inhabit. Environmental damage has varied greatly, yet there are few if any places that have not been harmed by the human footprint, literal or metaphorical. I soon realized that it was important, indeed imperative, to analyze how literature as a form of discourse deals with the causes and consequences of ecodegradation writ large. Once I no longer looked at texts primarily through the lenses of individual societies or environmental problems, but instead examined how creative works from disparate places negotiated more generally with ecological quandaries, their shared environmental ambiguity became unambiguously clear. The authorial, readerly, cultural, and environmental circumstances/identities behind the production of a particular text certainly mattered—including assumptions about target audience, as well as institutional control of literary production such as censorship practices—but not as much as I had presumed. Environmental ambiguity is a hallmark of everything from brief poems to multivolume novels; from the work of writers known globally to those scarcely recognized within their own societies; from texts discussing relatively isolated ecological damage to those concerned with ruin on a global scale; from those focusing on environmental distress, including ecological life narratives, to those mentioning it only briefly; from works that celebrate ecodegradation to those that decry it; in texts published everywhere from the Americas to Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.9 To be sure, ecoambiguity appears more prevalent in literature from East Asia than in other textual corpuses. And its irony is certainly deeper, considering the region's long cultural history celebrating the intimate ties between humans and Page 4 →nature even as its peoples severely damaged environments. But with several notable exceptions, and especially within East Asia, these disjunctions and their many permutations do not depend as much on specific literary culture or environmental problem as one might anticipate. And so I moved the focus to the concept of environmental ambiguity itself. Languages, genres, styles, and tropes differ within and across cultures, but the concerns raised have much in common. In addition, although I had first thought of focusing on a few key writers and texts, the more I read and was exposed to the incredible variety and richness of East Asian creative negotiations with environmental problems, the more it became vital to counter the common perception that, with several prominent exceptions, East Asian literatures typically describe only harmonious human-non-human relationships. Examining a wide range of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese texts that address ecodegradation makes us more aware of the many ways different societies have grappled with phenomena that are grounded in their specific cultures and histories but that also resonate with those of other places and peoples and have widespread regional if not global implications. Readers are invited to consider the particular ways that ecological problems are negotiated in the national literatures that form the focus of this book, while recognizing the many commonalities of human relationships with the nonhuman across time and space. Ecoambiguity hopes to work toward breaking down barriers of isolation, insularity, and exceptionalism, reminding us that although human societies, the environments in which they live, and the dilemmas facing different peoples and ecosystems are distinctive, they are not unique.

For most communities, limiting further ecological degradation and remediating damaged ecosystems of all sizes will require significant cultural change, including “new learning, a changed ethos, and vigorous action.”10 Societies need to reconceptualize the actual and the ideal places of people in ecosystems. Perceptions need to be aligned with actualities, and ideals need to be implemented. Essential to these endeavors is developing deeper, more nuanced understandings of the fluid relationships both among peoples and between peoples and environments in specific places and moments, as well as over time and across spaces. Writing, reading, and analyzing literature—openly imaginative texts with clear aesthetic ambitions—can perform important roles in this undertaking. Literature has the power to move us profoundly as it exposes how people dominate, damage, and destroy one another and the natural world. It also allows us to imagine alternative scenarios. Page 5 →As Lawrence Buell has argued, “For technological breakthroughs, legislative reforms, and paper covenants about environmental welfare to take effect, or even to be generated in the first place, requires a climate of transformed environmental values, perception, and will. To that end, the power of story, image, and artistic performance and the resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory are crucial.”11 The power of story is particularly significant. Our sense of reality, our understandings of who we are and of our relationships with our surroundings, generally are constructed around stories, not around quantitative data.12 The South African writer Njabulo S. Ndebele's comments on writing hold true for story: “[Writing] has the powerful capability to invade in a very intimate manner the personal world of the reader. Whenever you read, you risk being affected in a manner that can change the course of your life.”13 Stories, whether of the dangers or benefits of certain behaviors (e.g., consuming a particular product, from Vicodin and Percocet to red wine and dark chocolate), often surpass data in their power to change people's behavior. In fact, to become comprehensible, let alone to effect change, data themselves must be translated into narrative, and ultimately stories. Stories have the capacity to awaken, reinforce, and redirect environmental concern and creative thinking about environmental futures. Taking Buell's argument one step further, stories not only help shape legislation that requires changes in behaviors; stories also can cause sweeping changes in behaviors on a large scale in the absence of public policy.14 Yet the stories we tell ourselves to construct our sense of reality often differ from the stories narrated in creative texts and other art forms: the former tend to impose more logic and unity, or at least what appear to be logic and unity. There are of course numerous exceptions, as depicted in the American writer Don DeLillo's novel White Noise (1984) and the German writer Günter Grass's novel Die Rätten (The Rat, 1986).15 But as George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller have observed, “The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives, of sequences of events with an internal logic and dynamic that appear as a unified whole.”16 Likewise, documentary nonfiction, which frequently translates data into narrative, is committed to precision, or at least to the pretense of precision.17 Literature's regular and often blatant defiance of logic, precision, and unity, by contrast, enables it to grapple more insistently and penetratingly than many other discourses with ambiguities in general and with those arising from interactions among people and ecosystems in particular.18 More specifically, literature's intrinsic multivalence allows it to highlight and negotiate—reveal, (re)interpret, and shape—the ambiguity that has long suffused Page 6 →interactions between people and environments, including those interactions that involve human damage to ecosystems. Ambiguity here emerges not primarily as an ethical or aesthetic value but as a symptom of epistemological uncertainty that is parsed both sympathetically and exactingly as a deficit of consciousness and/or implicit confession of the impotence of writers and literary characters. Environmental ambiguity manifests itself in multiple, intertwined ways, including ambivalent attitudes toward nature; confusion about the actual condition of the nonhuman, often a consequence of ambiguous information; contradictory human behaviors toward ecosystems; and discrepancies among attitudes, conditions, and behaviors that lead to actively downplaying and acquiescing to nonhuman degradation, as well as to inadvertently harming the very environments one is attempting to protect.19 My readings of hundreds of creative works from diverse cultures reveal these imbricated forms of ecoambiguity as fundamental attributes of literary works that discuss relationships between people and the nonhuman world. Most interesting is how creative texts articulate the permutations and implications of these discrepancies vertically in time and horizontally in physical and social space. I focus this study at a middle range between the global and the local, looking regionally at the interrelated

literatures and cultures of East Asia, a prime arena of ecological concern and debate today. Analyzing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese fiction and poetry of the past hundred years reveals these literatures as replete with discourse on ecodegradation and ecoambiguity to a degree that might surprise readers accustomed to conventional images of Asian ecological harmony.20 East Asian artists and philosophers have long idealized people's interactions with their nonhuman surroundings. Their representations have given the impression that East Asians, unlike Americans and Europeans, are inherently sensitive to the environment, that they love nature and intermingle peacefully with it. Yet romanticizing close relationships between people and their environments has more often defied than reflected empirical reality. Like most peoples, East Asians have for millennia reshaped, even exploited their surroundings. Moreover, much modern and even some premodern East Asian fiction and poetry depict people damaging everything from small spaces to entire continents. As the first book in any language on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary depictions of damaged environments, Ecoambiguity is grounded in original Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language sources held in major archival collections throughout the region. I hope that the following chapters will open new portals of inquiry in both East Asian studies and ecocriticism, and also in comparative and world literatures. Page 7 →

Changing Environments Constantly shifting relationships within and among biotic, abiotic, and cultural entities ensure that ecosystems undergo relentless transformation. People are incessantly changing and being changed by one another, their (in) tangible artifacts, and the natural world. But anthropogenic alterations of ecosystems are especially striking. In their relationships with environments, two factors set people apart from the nonhuman. First, humans are the only species that has changed terrestrial and marine ecosystems in every corner of the planet. Second, people have an exceptional ability to destroy the very ecosystems on which they depend for existence.21 As Jared Diamond has argued, “Managing environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult, ever since Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency, and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago…Every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans…has been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals…Any people can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources.”22 People have long altered the places they live and work, as well as more distant sites through fires, mining, damming, and more recently large-scale industrialization, carbon dioxide emissions, and nuclear weapons.23 And scientists increasingly are unearthing the importance of human factors in changes once believed to be “natural,” including damage from storms, floods, and exploding animal populations.24 From earliest times, communities of gatherers cleared forests via felling, ring barking, and fire to make room for desired plants. Hunting changed ecosystems more dramatically: within several hundred years of human settlement on Madagascar (first century C.E.), most of the island's larger animals were extinct; early aboriginals killed off 80 percent of Australia's large animals; primitive hunters in South America likewise cost the continent approximately 80 percent of its large animals.25 But the changes to environments brought about by gathering and hunting pale next to those instigated by agricultural communities, which first developed about ten millennia ago.26 Agriculture (including animal husbandry), accompanied by deforestation, soil erosion, and rising populations, not only concentrated the environmental consequences of human activities. Farming also made it more difficult for human societies to escape the ecological consequences of their actions. The decline and even collapse of a number of the world's great early civilizations—those in Sumer and elsewhere in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, China, the Mediterranean (including Greece and Rome), Egypt, the Americas (such as the Maya), Nordic countries (particularly Ice-land and Greenland), and Easter Island—have been attributed at least in Page 8 →part to massive human-induced changes to ecosystems, including unsustainable agricultural practices.27 Transformations of environments gradually accelerated and intensified across time, as populations increased and technology became more sophisticated in sites around the world. European expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Australia beginning in the sixteenth century launched new eras of environmental transformation. But the industrial revolution starting in the late eighteenth century, the development of nuclear weapons in the mid-

twentieth century, and the human population explosion of the last fifty years have resulted in massive changes to environments.28 The implications of the late twentieth-century information revolution for environmental change are unclear. Greater access to data and ideas has enhanced environmental consciousness, but it also has triggered an environmental backlash; accessibility has prevented some changes while accelerating others.29 Greenness is often a mirage. As Daniel Goleman argues, “Today's standards for greenness will be seen tomorrow as ecomyopia…Greenwashing pollutes the data available to consumers, gumming up marketplace efficiency by pawning off misleading information to get us to buy things that do not deliver on their promise.”30 Gustave Speth summarizes conditions as of the first decade of the twenty-first century: Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years…Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us…Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than a third and have started in earnest the dangerous process of warming the planet and disrupting climate.31 Speth, like Mark Dowie, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and other intellectuals, blames not only governments, corporations, the media, and private citizens but also environmental activists themselves for choosing “to work within the system,” for dealing with effects, not causes, and for not Page 9 →investing in “deeper approaches to change.”32 Clearly, ambiguity undergirds the attitudes, as well as the behaviors, of even those most committed to repairing current ecodegradation and preventing future damage.

Environmental Ambiguity Every human action changes environments. Some changes are readily visible and accounted for, some are readily visible yet ignored or denied, some become apparent only after archaeological excavation or scientific examination, others are merely hypothesized, while countless remain unknown. Describing change to environments has long been a challenge: often new concepts must be developed and terms coined. Pinpointing agents of change has been no easier. Even the most obvious perpetrators can be wrapped in webs of disclaimers. Likewise, accurately predicting change has nearly always proved difficult. This is often because the nonhuman appears or is imagined to be inexhaustible, and signs of imminent depletion are easily ignored or are not readily apparent.33 Even more problematic has been evaluating change, whether past, present, or anticipated: what change can be understood as damage, what damage can be condoned, even encouraged? Simon C. Estok has characterized anthropogenic transformations of environments as stemming largely from ecophobia, understood as “an irrational and groundless fear or hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”34 Ecophobia, Estok writes, regularly “wins out” over its alleged opposites: biophilia, understood as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms,” and, more generally, ecophilia, or love of nature.35 To be sure, ecophobia can explain much of people's desire throughout history to control (parts of) the natural environment and engage in such massive destruction of nature as largescale deforestation and species eradication. Likewise, ecophilia seems to propel people's embrace of nature, as well as promote environmental remediation and conservation, and, in fact, inspire the field of ecocriticism itself. But as the cliché “love nature to death” suggests, environmental changes need not be symptoms of absolute ecophobia or ecophilia. A bias against the nonhuman that keeps someone inside a city apartment relatively cut off from nature surely alters the nonhuman less directly and potentially less substantially than a love of the natural world that leads someone to drive for hours to go hiking or canoeing.36 And even when changes are motivated largely by ecophobia or ecophilia, the changes themselves often are less easily evaluated. Page 10 →The uncertainties suffusing relationships and interpretations of relationships between people and their environments suggest that ecoambiguity is often more prominent than ecophobia or ecophilia alone.37 Attitudes and behaviors toward natural phenomena, as well as information on environmental conditions, arise

based on social standards and the institutions that enforce these standards—among them economic, educational, familial, journalistic, legal, medical, military, penal, political, and religious. The variability of a society's norms for perceived, actual, and ideal relationships between people and the nonhuman contributes significantly to the ecoambiguity underlying changes to environments. Human attitudes toward the nonhuman are often marked by ambivalence. An individual or group can simultaneously feel positively (e.g., reverent), negatively (e.g., antagonistic), uncertain, and apathetic toward different species; an individual or group can also have mixed emotions toward a single species, or about the nonhuman more generally.38 Just as frequently, a single plant, animal, or ecosystem will evoke positive sentiments in some people, negative sentiments in some people, uncertainty in others, and no discernable emotions in still others.39 Likewise, perceptions of (in)appropriate lifestyles and of what constitutes (ir)responsible behavior vis-à-vis environments change regularly and often are contradictory. Beliefs also are inconsistent on what makes changes to ecosystems necessary or at least acceptable. Perceptions vary on which changes should be prevented, encouraged, and over-looked; which are mitigated by other changes; and which should be altered, and how and by whom.40 Informed in part by ambivalent attitudes arising from social standards and institutions that are themselves contested, human behaviors toward the nonhuman tend to be contradictory. Behaviors fluctuate and cancel out one another.41 They also often are at odds with attitudes and at times correspond surprisingly little with environmental conditions.42 In her pathbreaking Silent Spring (1962) the American marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson declared: “We are reminded that in nature nothing exists alone…The earth's vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.”43 Carson's words are well intended. If consequences are pondered, presumably behaviors will be modified. Presumably, but not necessarily: “thought” and “full awareness” run the risk of excusing, even facilitating ecodegradation. Page 11 → Ambiguity attends the impacts of behaviors: even those that seem to be easily categorized as “helping” (e.g., recycling) or “hurting” (e.g., deforesting) ecosystems can have indefinite or incongruous outcomes and uncertain implications. Alan Macfarlane summarizes some of the paradoxes of change: “Almost every change has negative as well as positive effects…The contradictory consequences are numerous and remind us that for almost every two steps forward on one front, there is a step back on another.”44 For instance, the same technology that improves the lives of some creatures harms the lives of others, whether of the same or different species. Likewise the same nonhuman being can both help and harm a single ecosystem.45 Macfarlane's comment assumes that the contradictory consequences of change can be neatly classified as “positive” or “negative,” as moving conditions “forward” or “backward.” But “positive” or “negative” to what/ whom? Moving “forward” or “backward” from what/whose perspective? To give one example, at the same time that dams generate power for downstream communities and prevent flooding, they block fish from migrating and create lakes that bury upstream communities. They thus have been widely condemned, particularly in recent decades. On the other hand, just as generating power can lead to further environmental destruction and preventing flooding can harm flora and fauna that depend on it, new lakes can foster new ecosystems and homes for diverse species, while the absence of fish can allow other species to flourish. For its part, dismantling dams—a growing trend from rural Maine to urban Japan—allows the populations of many species to resurge, but this in turn can encourage increased aquatic recreation, which pollutes environments in other ways. Potentially dangerous as well to downstream communities is the release of contaminated sediment when dams are dismantled.46 Strengthening one group, whether people, trees, fish, or parasites, often weakens another group; the more complex the landscape and the more nebulous its borders, the more difficult it is to evaluate changes taking place within it. Ambiguity spares not even the hybrid vehicle. The Toyota Prius, marketed under the seductive albeit gendered slogan “Harmony between Man, Nature, and Machine” and since July 2009 the top selling vehicle in Japan, not only is

the most fuel efficient car on the market, it also is nearly quiet when running on battery power.47 Silence might seem an entirely “positive” feature: spaces free from the sounds of people and their technologies are something of an endangered species, especially in industrialized nations.48 But in fact, quiet cars themselves endanger the vision-impaired and others who rely on sound to navigate urban space. And so Toyota developed an optional speaker Page 12 →system for its third-generation Prius; with the flick of a switch drivers can make their vehicle sound like a regular car.49 Even if silent cars continue to propagate, the damage they cause likely will not be severe, since people will become more accustomed to them. The same cannot be said of larger scale ostensibly ecofriendly actions, particularly those that would radically transform already transformed environments. David Harvey has argued: There are very few if any ecosystems in the world today that do not bear the marks of continuous human actions, and the continuity of that action is essential to their maintenance. If global capitalism collapsed tomorrow, there would be a dramatically stressful period of ecological adaptation as dams and irrigation ditches deteriorated, as fertilizer inputs diminished, as urban and agrarian systems collapsed. It is, then, flows of money that make the contemporary environment what it is, and any interruption in those money and commodity flows will potentially have ecological consequences just as catastrophic as the history of the development of these flows has had since World War II…The right to be free of ecological destruction is posed so strongly as a negative right that it appears to preclude the positive right to transform the Earth in ways conducive to the well-being of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed.50 The ever more sophisticated findings of scientists, social scientists, humanists, activists, and other concerned citizens have helped resolve numerous ambiguities about the condition of ecosystems. But acting productively on this knowledge has proved difficult. Much information is suppressed, and the information that is released tends to be interpreted in conflicting ways; it is often distorted, politicized, and overshadowed by other rhetoric.51 In addition, new information often brings with it new questions, in turn further destabilizing knowledge about environmental conditions. Feeling ambivalent about such ambiguities is not uncommon: people frequently are aware but not sure what to make of all the contradictions. In short, interactions among people and environments—particularly interactions involving significant changes to ecosystems—are nothing if not ambiguous. Consciousness of ambiguity does not necessarily hamper efforts to repair environments; in fact, it can foster broader cooperation.52 It also encourages a surprising flexibility in attitudes and behaviors that can help relieve many of the problems facing human and nonhuman communities.53 Page 13 →

Environments of Literature Since prehistoric times, cultural products, themselves part of the ecologies of local and global spaces, have negotiated changes within and among ecosystems. Paleolithic cave paintings dating to well before 30,000 B.C.E. give diverse perspectives on human practices that alter environments.54 Language has likewise played an important role in transforming ecosystems. It has been used to command, describe, justify, celebrate, condemn, encourage amelioration of, or divert attention from human treatment of environments. For thousands of years creative texts around the world have probed not only how people are affected by their surroundings but also how and why they alter environments near and far; most literary works that feature people show them changing ecosystems. References in literature to constructing, inhabiting, and dismantling built environments as well as to hunting, agriculture, and eating all point to changed landscapes. Even creative texts without human characters (e.g., animal stories) often at least mention human-induced transformations of environments. For its part, world literature—understood broadly as creative texts that have circulated beyond their culture of origin— has since The Epic of Gilgamesh (second millennium B.C.E.) depicted people as radically altering their surroundings.55 Classifying change as actual damage is not necessarily straightforward; injury to one component of an ecosystem is often precisely what enables another to flourish. For the most part I consider damage to be human-induced

change that significantly harms the health of an ecosystem, often by compromising its biodiversity or its capacity for self-renewal.56 These changes can involve the injury or death of a single creature or plant, members of a single species, or more often members of multiple species, if not entire species themselves. Degrading an environment can include harming or uprooting plants by weeding, deforesting, or spraying, or it can involve widespread displacing, injuring, or killing via fishing, hunting, and polluting. Damaging an environment also frequently involves radically changing its abiotic components, including its air, water, and soil.57 Creative discourse on human transformations of environments regularly spotlights the ambiguities of these changes. Literature is not the only art form that foregrounds ecoambiguity, but it is certainly one of the most compelling. Even within a single text, characters can disagree considerably on whether changes might be celebrated, condoned, or condemned, on whether changes should be continued, impeded, modified, or reversed, and on the effect of these uncertainties on people and the nonhuman. Creative works additionally Page 14 →discuss ecological damage of differing spatial and temporal scopes, including situated damage—short-term injury to relatively small, isolated ecosystems; spatially pervasive damage—harm of relatively limited temporal scope that affects larger or multiple ecosystems; temporally pervasive damage—environmental degradation whose duration is greater than its spatial scope; and encompassing damage—environmental degradation that is both enduring and widespread. Also varying considerably are causes and types of degradation; the range of species affected (including the presence or absence of notable human suffering); and the proportion of the text devoted to explicit discussion of environmental distress. Ecoambiguity shows that much East Asian literature addressing harm to ecosystems is environmentally cosmopolitan (ecocosmopolitan), either explicitly or implicitly taking up ecodegradation beyond a single time or place.58 The most obviously ecocosmopolitan texts are those that speak generally about degradation on a potentially global scale. These are frequently poems or other short texts that talk broadly of “human beings” destroying the planet. More complex expressions of environmental cosmopolitanism are found in creative work that explicitly depicts particular types and instances of ecodegradation, regardless of scale, as encompassed in larger environmental problems or encompassing smaller ones. For instance, even a short poem that focuses on a single ailing animal might also speak explicitly of this animal's suffering as resulting from large-scale deforestation. Similarly, a lengthy novel on climate change or the eradication of multiple species worldwide is likely also to speak in detail on conditions in specific places. Other ecocosmopolitan texts depict problems in one space as analogous to those in other spaces: a literary work focusing on a polluted field might speak of the resemblance between damage done to this tract of land and similar harm done to another at some distance. Many texts that concentrate on incidents that occur in a specific place and time both draw parallels with conditions in other places and times and speak of these instances as part of larger patterns of environmental distress or as encompassing smaller problems. Although literary treatments of human relationships with damaged environments often exhibit strong local ties, on the whole they tend to be somewhat less culturally, nationally, or even regionally specific than discourse on other subjects, including celebrations of nature.59 This is not surprising considering that environmental globalization is the oldest form of globalization, predating its economic, political, social, and cultural counterparts.60 In addition, many writers who take up environmental damage, including those whose work is examined in this book, have spent substantial time abroad and witnessed ecodegradation in multiple locales. Ecological globalization has arguably facilitated Page 15 →its literary counterpart, and literary globalization has brought increased attention to its ecological counterpart. Much ecocosmopolitanism is implicit and raises questions of environmental actuality and possibility. Environmental actuality refers to the ecological degradation that a text explicitly addresses or to which it clearly alludes. Environmental possibility indicates the human-induced environmental harm that a text more abstractly implicates. This can be damage a writer might mean to signify, but does so in a less than obvious manner.61 More generally, environmental possibility refers to what can be deduced or extrapolated from a creative work, regardless of authorial intent and the specific social and environmental circumstances surrounding textual production. Numerous creative works focus on situated damage that could be read as a microcosm of spatially pervasive damage, temporally pervasive damage, or even encompassing damage. Thus in some cases a brief poem on a single ailing creature that contains no references to other animals can be read as addressing the plight of that

species or of multiple species in multiple spaces. So too in some cases can a short story on animals suffering from pesticides used in a single field, with mere changes to place, personal, and species names (if these are given), increase understanding of the plight of animals in other spaces. In short, texts can be environmentally cosmopolitan without speaking explicitly of ecological degradation beyond a single time and place. It is often difficult to determine whether a text's environmental possibilities can or should take precedence over its environmental actualities, especially when—as nearly always is the case—these possibilities are ambiguous.62 But the extent of environmental degradation currently facing the planet requires that we look closely at these possibilities. This is not to deny the particularities of ecological distress in individual sites or the need to understand the specific circumstances of cultural production. The latter are especially important in cases where the writer is active in environmental or other political movements, or where the text focuses on ecological concerns apparently distinctive to a single place. Moreover, the reader's own background and circumstances affect how a text's possibilities are grasped. Still, the analyst of literary works on environmental degradation must take seriously actualities, possibilities, and the myriad positions in between. Creative texts, as tangible cultural products, stand within, not outside, ecosystems from the local to the global, something that allows them to comment instructively on a variety of environments. Literature rarely offers comprehensive remedies, much less proposes official policies to prevent future or remediate current damage to landscapes; in some cases creative writing itself might even abet the ecodegradation it Page 16 →deplores. But drafting policies, not to mention implementing them, requires changes in consciousness—perceptions, understandings, and expectations— something literature is well placed to enhance. To be sure, celebrations of the wonders of nature, even those that make no mention of compromised environments, have moved readers greatly and done much to foster environmental consciousness.63 Yet more explicit creative discourse on degraded environments—whether it describes actual conditions or imagines (im)possible scenarios, whether it is embedded in overt celebrations of nature or forms the center of a text—highlights especially clearly the immediate challenges confronting ecosystems of all kinds.64 Creative works that directly address environmental damage also indicate the difficulties in pinpointing precise causes and providing surefire solutions. And to varying degrees they address one of the greatest ambiguities of human changes to landscapes: to what extent these changes matter, morally and ecologically. Literature that probes degraded ecosystems thus underlines the urgency of better understanding the ambiguity that pervades relationships among people and their environments, including human efforts to protect or repair the nonhuman.65 This literature points directly to the consequences of failing to do so. At stake is less the loss of glorious, often imagined wilderness than the loss of actual lives, both human and nonhuman.

Changing Environments of Literature Because damaged environments are a global phenomenon, literary treatments of ecodegradation regularly transcend their particular cultures of production and together form intercultural thematic and conceptual networks. Intercultural thematic networks are webs of creative texts from multiple cultures that focus on similar topics, whether or not the writers of these texts actively reconfigure one another's work.66 Ecoambiguity demonstrates the development of thematic webs concerned with degraded environments dia-chronically through time as well as their synchronic presence across space. As Werner Sollors has argued: By making [a particular theme the constant], the persistence and scope of the literature can begin to be sketched; at the same time, many other variables are left open, inviting comparisons across literary genres and periods…What may seem intriguing or cryptic in an individual work may be clarified by considering other literary and nonliterary texts; what may appear radically innovative in one textPage 17 → may actually be widely shared by many earlier literary texts and other documents; what is praised as the accomplishment (or what the New Critics might call the “thematic unity”) of a single text may be more fairly viewed as the nuanced refiguring of themes that are familiar from many other texts; what is regarded as the defining motif of a certain ethnic group may really be a shared feature of many other ethnic and national literatures; what is looked at as a startling and noteworthy “subversion” of a traditional element may actually be in itself a traditional commonplace.67

Likewise, Rob Nixon has rightly proposed that instead of automatically placing into national ecocanons creative texts on specific environmental issues such as land rights, nuclear testing, pollution, and oil, we instead reposition these works in international context and examine them comparatively. Doing so will allow us not only to diversify environmental literary canons but also to reconceptualize the prevailing paradigms of these canons.68 I speak of such intercultural thematic networks where appropriate. But this book goes one step further in reconfiguring paradigms by focusing not on national networks or even on networks formed around a specific environmental problem (thematic networks) but instead on those formed around concepts (conceptual networks)—in this case ecoambiguity, which undergirds and accompanies environmental degradation of most kinds, places, and times. The focus is primarily on environmental ambiguity in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary works that address ecodegradation. Yet by also touching on dozens of other creative texts from diverse eras and locations—including Africa, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia— the book emphasizes the global reach of this phenomenon. Engaging with literature in this way repositions the markers of East Asian studies, ecocriticism, and comparative and world literatures. It also increases the planetary consciousness of literature studies. Researchers in the social and natural sciences both within and outside East Asia have written extensively on environmental problems in modern and premodern China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, on the many movements and organizations that have fought against ecodegradation, and on official responses on local, subnational, national, and regional levels. In contrast, most humanistic research on East Asian literary works that discuss interactions between people and nature has looked at creative manipulations of the latter: literary celebrations of nature; depictions of nature as a refuge, often imagined, from human society; portraits of relatively harmonious integrationPage 18 → of people with nature; or, less frequently, episodes of people overpowered by calamities such as avalanches, earthquakes, and floods. Much less has been published on East Asian creative negotiations with environmental damage, despite its presence in thousands of years of Chinese-, Japanese-, and Koreanlanguage literatures, and particularly in the region's twentieth- and early twenty-first-century creative corpuses. Ecoambiguity thus contributes to an emerging subfield within East Asian studies. This book also is intended to widen the geographic and linguistic scope of ecocriticism (environmentally oriented literature studies, literature-and-environment studies).69 In the United States and Europe most ecocritical scholarship draws from American and European literatures, and even in Asia discussions of the relationship between literature and damaged environments has focused disproportionately on Western examples.70 Scholarship on environmentalism and postcolonialism has surged in recent years, analyzing the ecological implications of texts from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.71 But most of this research has concentrated on the Westernlanguage literatures of these regions. In the coming years, ecocritics will need to address a broader range of literatures, including those from East Asia, a region home to three of the world's largest economies and nearly one-fourth of its people.72 East Asia is heir to thousands of years of writings on human interactions with environments. It is also heir to thousands of years of intense environmental degradation. Moreover, ecoambiguity has been particularly pronounced in the region. East Asia has long been associated with belief systems advocating reverence for nature, especially Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto as well as numerous indigenous philosophies and religions.73 These modes of thought have inspired the environmentality, or concern for environmental health, of numerous Asian as well as American, European, and to a lesser extent Middle Eastern and African intellectuals.74 Popular perceptions both within and outside East Asia often hold that environmental degradation in the region began in the late nineteenth century, when East Asian peoples, pressured by Western nations, assimilated the latter's technologies and industries. But actually, East Asian societies have long histories of transforming environments. Rhoades Murphey has gone so far as to argue: All Asian cultures in the areas east of Afghanistan and south of the former Soviet Union have long been noted for their admiring attitudes toward nature…All of this is contrasted with the Western view…The Asian record, however, makes it clear that, despite the professed values of the literate elite, people have altered or destroyed the AsianPage 19 → environment for longer and on a greater scale than anywhere else in the world, even in the twentieth-century West.75 Murphey perhaps overstates the case, since the changes early East Asian peoples made to environments did not

have the reach of those instigated by societies in the twentieth-century West. Nevertheless, the disjuncture between beliefs and behaviors is significant. As the historian Mark Elvin has observed concerning China: Through more than three thousand years, the Chinese refashioned China. They cleared the forests and the original vegetation cover, terraced its hill-slopes, and partitioned its valley floors into fields. They diked, dammed, and diverted its rivers and lakes. They hunted or domesticated its animals and birds; or else destroyed their habitats as a by-product of the pursuit of economic improvements. By lateimperial times there was little that could be called “natural” left untouched by this process of exploitation and adaptation…A paradox thus lay at the heart of Chinese attitudes to the landscape. On the one hand it was seen…as a part of the supreme numinous power itself. Wisdom required that one put oneself into its rhythms and be conscious of one's inability to reshape it. On the other hand the landscape was in fact tamed, transformed, and exploited to a degree that had few parallels in the premodern world.76 Heiner Roetz expands on this line of reasoning, boldly claiming that in early China, “a sympathetic feeling for nature, like that [expressed in] the Zhuangzi, was a simple reaction against [what was actually happening].”77 Roetz stretches the point. Not all expressions of sympathy, much less celebrations of nature, even celebrations emanating from societies that are significantly transforming their environments, can be read as reactions against actual conditions. But most can be discussed as providing alternatives. East Asian peoples long have had a heightened consciousness of human-induced damage to environments, but despite the commitment of individuals, organizations, and governments to repairing extant damage and limiting further harm, overall environmental degradation in the region shows every sign of persisting.78 To be sure, many of East Asia's most obvious environmental problems have been ameliorated in the past few decades, including urban air and water pollution in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent China. Faced with the combined challenges of high population density, accelerated consumption, and decreasing tolerance for damaged surroundings, EastPage 20 → Asian societies have devised ingenious solutions to environmental problems. The Japanese, for instance, developed scrubber technology to filter emissions, as well as low-emission garbage incinerators to power local facilities.79 They also have profited from selling pollution-control technology to China. The Chinese, for their part, currently are constructing six mammoth wind farms, each of which “dwarfs anything else, anywhere in the world.”80 In Dezhou (Shandong Province), the Chinese are constructing the world's largest solar energy production base.81 And engineers at the Hanguk Kwahak Kisulwn (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in Taejn are making progress on an electric vehicle system that provides power via induction strips embedded in roads; this system eventually will allow Seoul to replace its 9,000 gasoline-fueled buses with electric models that would reduce Korea's dependence on foreign oil.82 But in many cases pollution is simply being exported, not eradicated, creating multiple shadow ecologies.83 Sulfur dioxide emissions from coal burning in China have caused serious acid rain problems outside China's borders. The rapid expansion of China's Gobi Desert, brought about by deforestation and overgrazing, has intensified the region's sand and dust storms, primary carriers of China's industrial pollutants to neighboring countries.84 Japan has a long history of preserving its own forests while relying on timber from Southeast Asia, while in the 1970s, largely in response to environmental regulations at home, Japan began outsourcing its heavy-pollution industries to China and other parts of Asia. And so for more than thirty years there has been a “lively debate over the relationship between Asia's environmental crisis and the Japanese political economy,” with Japan alternating between “environmental superpower” (kanky taikoku) and “pollution superpower” (kgai taikoku).85 At the same time, claims of remediation have been exaggerated. Recent research indicates that improvements in Beijing's air quality during the 2008 Olympics had more to do with fortunate weather patterns than with source control measures.86 As Chapter 1 discusses in detail, environmental conditions and responses to these conditions differ greatly within the region and among different areas of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. East Asian literary mediations of relationships among people and environments, particularly relationships that involve changes to the nonhuman, have also varied considerably across time and space. This region's diverse literatures thus are fertile

soil for twenty-first-century ecocritical research. In teasing out the contradictions inherent in literary discourse on environmental degradation I also attempt to bring new perspectives to ecocriticism. The “first-wave” ecocritical scholarship of the 1990s often adopted a biocentric or preservationist approach, focusing largely on nature writing and Page 21 →on the capacity of literature to model ecocentric values, as well as on literary depictions of the biological, psychological, and spiritual bonds joining humans and the natural world.87 Ecocriticism's “second wave,” which gained momentum around the turn of the twenty-first century, has taken a more anthropocentric or sociocentric standpoint; this scholarship highlights literature of the city and industrialization, as well as environmental (in)justice and related social issues, particularly in the context of ethnic and minority concerns, indigeneity, postcolonialism, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism. It likewise moves place-attachment from the local to the transnational or global.88 To date, both waves of ecocriticism have made significant breakthroughs, including foregrounding relatively neglected literary genres and subgenres such as nature writing, toxification narrative, ecopoetry, and ecodrama that are concerned with relationships among people and their environments; reinterpreting thematic configurations related to the environment such as the pastoral, environmental racism, and eco-apocalypticism; and uncovering environmental subtexts from a range of creative works. Most recently, the field has looked to diverse genres and media beyond the written text, including graphic novels, animated film, bioart and green architecture, and innovative digital data sources, transforming how scholars think about the ecocritical agenda.89 What has not yet been widely seen in these modes of ecocriticism is sustained attention to the complex ambiguities we face in responding to the vexed issues raised by rapid ecological change and degradation. The future of ecocriticism has been said to lie in demonstrating the place of environmentality in literature, especially literature's posing environmentality as a “thought experiment…complicated by multiple agendas and refusal to take fixed positions.”90 There is no question that engaging with environments, inevitably fraught with ambiguity, has long been a vital part of global textual production. Yet it also is important to examine the dynamics of ecoambiguity itself, that is, the complexities of shaping, implementing, and interpreting environmental-ethical concerns, as well as their conceptual and physical implications. Adopting neither a primarily biocentric/preservationist nor a primarily anthropocentric/sociocentric position, Ecoambiguity instead analyzes the intricacies of environmental ambiguity in a wide range of works—from creative texts concentrating nearly exclusively on ecodegradation to those that refer only briefly to it, from texts on the devastation of wilderness to those treating the polluted slums of dense megacities, from texts that celebrate ecodegradation to those that decry it. It explores the multiple ways fiction and poetry highlight the absence of simple answers and the paucity of facile solutions to environmental problems. Page 22 → In addition to expanding the fields of East Asian studies and ecocriticism, I hope to strengthen the presence of comparative modern East Asian literatures in the field of comparative literature. In Europe the field has focused largely on European literatures, and in the United States on European and to a lesser extent American literatures; in both the United States and Europe considerable work also has been done on literary relations between the West and non-West, broadly defined. In East Asia, scholars of comparative literature have addressed these same concerns. They also have written extensively on relationships among early Chinese literature and the early literatures of Japan or Korea. Increasing numbers of East Asian scholars are now examining interactions between any two of the four modern East Asian literatures. But scholarship on relationships among the modern Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language literatures of the region is still in its infancy. As with my Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature, the first book in any language to analyze interactions among modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds and literatures, Ecoambiguity examines in comparative perspective the literatures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. I place my individual textual analyses in environmental and historical context, even while calling attention both to the internal diversity of literary works and to the amorphous boundaries that nominally separate them.91 I also identify patterns of transculturation within East Asia, where transculturation is understood as the “many different

processes of assimilation, adaptation, rejection, parody, resistance, loss, and ultimately transformation” of cultures and cultural products.92 My discussions of intraregional flows are incorporated into those of interregional vectors and global cultural currents. East Asia and its literary products have a long history as contact spaces of global discourse on relationships between people and nature, where contact spaces are understood broadly as physical and creative sites of transculturation.93 Notwithstanding the region's extensive record of environmental degradation, the environmentality of its philosophies and religions as well as of individual artists and intellectuals has for centuries inspired people the world over. Likewise, East Asians have actively transculturated the environmentality of counterparts from outside the region. Global networks of peoples, ideas, and texts concerned with the degradation of environments have become particularly complex since the mid-twentieth century, as the severity and scope of this degradation have become more apparent. These networks form an important component of world literature, which has been identified by David Damrosch as Page 23 → all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin either in translation or in their original language…a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present in a literary system beyond that of its original culture…World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures…[It] is not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time…[that helps us] appreciate the ways in which a literary work reaches out and away from its point of origin.94 The study of world literature has burgeoned in recent years, but little has been written on the relationship between world literature and ecodegradation, even though countless works of world literature take up the human destruction of environments. To help galvanize the study of world literature and globalized environment, Ecoambiguity includes discussion of works of world literature that originated in East Asia and others that have found a second home there, generally in translation.95 Most of the creative works analyzed in Ecoambiguity have been translated into at least one language, but few have had a truly active presence in literary systems beyond their original culture. They thus are not generally interpreted as works of world literature. On the other hand, almost all of these texts address concerns that transcend those of their source cultures and are environmentally cosmopolitan, either explicitly or implicitly. Much can be gained by reading them as world literature, that is to say examining how they reach beyond their points of origin. Ideally, I argue, literary systems should be studied not only along cultural/national lines, but also in terms of intercultural thematic and conceptual networks. The most significant networks address urgent matters of global significance, including poverty, disease, slavery, warfare, and environmental destruction. Spotlighting these networks reveals how readily literature traverses boundaries of all kinds: environmental, political and administrative, economic, demographic, and cultural and social.96 One of the most effective means of increasing the planetary consciousness of literary studies is reading as world literature even those texts that might not be works of world literature in the conventional sense but that engage with important issues extending beyond single cultures.97 The worlds these texts discuss often are physically beyond our own place and time, but the concerns they address strike close to home. Concepts of “planetary consciousness” have long been linked with imperialism. Discussing natural history in eighteenth-century Europe, Mary Louise Pratt aligns that era's “planetary consciousness” with disruption, (re)ordering, imperialism, and Eurocentrism: Page 24 → The eighteenth-century systematizing of nature as a European knowledge-building project…created a new kind of Eurocentered planetary consciousness. Blanketing the surface of the globe, it specified plants and animals in visual terms as discrete entities, subsuming and reassembling them in a finite,

totalizing order of European making.98

Racism, culturalism, and speciesism, which assume the superiority of people or particular groups of people, underlie quests for this form of planetary consciousness. Other intellectuals have argued that people are themselves the “planet's consciousness.” For instance, despite their philosophical differences, the prominent Soviet geochemist and mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky and the French theologian, biologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin both believed “that human beings are the planet's consciousness with the right, responsibility and now ability…[to] direct evolutionary forces.”99 Teilhard de Chardin embraced and expanded on Vernadsky's argument that the planet, already having evolved from a geosphere into a biosphere, ultimately was being transformed into a noosphere, a sphere of human thought, a sphere that “human beings [had] a duty to modify…through science and technology.”100 But just as emphasizing “planetary consciousness” can strengthen local-, ethno-, anthro-, or other centrisms, it also can be used to counter prejudices. Referring to the work of the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, particularly The Invention of the Americas (1995), Nelson Maldonado Torres observes: “Against the (imperial) ‘planetary’ perspective of European imperial eyes that became instrumental for bourgeois colonial adventures, Dussel deploys another ‘planetary’ perspective…Instead of serving imperialism, this ‘planetary’ perspective aims to overcome Eurocentrism.”101 This is precisely the objective of a number of contemporary imaginings of planetary consciousness. In the past decade, critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Wai Chee Dimock have urged scholars of both comparative literature and national literatures to take a more planetary approach. By this they mean, in simplest terms, increasing both the scope and the cultural grounding of literature studies. Dimock proposes reading American literature as a subset, by no means the most encompassing one, of “an infinite number of larger aggregates that take their measure from the durations and extensions of the human species itself, folding in American literature as one fold among others.”102 The perspective she advocates could easily be applied with modification to any number of other literatures, national or otherwise. Spivak arguesPage 25 → somewhat controversially that “as presumed collectivities cross borders under the auspices of a comparative literature supplemented by Area Studies, they might attempt to figure themselves—imagine themselves—as planetary rather than continental, global, or worldly…It is as an alternative…to the arrogance of the cartographic reading of world lit. in translation as the task of Comparative Literature, that I propose the planet.”103 Evocations of the planet enrich literature studies as they enrich human understanding more generally. Recent visions of planetary humanism and planetary consciousness stress the need to analyze creative and other discourse on urgent issues of actual or potential interregional and often planetary import. Paul Gilroy speaks of the importance of developing “a planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other,” as well as “a planetary consciousness of the tragedy, fragility, and brevity of indivisible human existence.”104 Likewise, in her discussion of the value of adopting a more planetary research program, Dimock gives the example of slavery, which although “so often studied only within the geography and chronology of the United States, becomes a virtually unrecognizable phenomenon when it is taken outside these space and time coordinates.” She rightly highlights the “conceptual broadening that comes with [the] broadening of the evidentiary ground.”105 Although Dimock here speaks of broadening the evidentiary ground of historical research, literary criticism might follow a similar trajectory, examining more fully, for instance, intercultural networks on slavery and other human rights abuses. Such criticism would analyze creative works as products both of specific times and places and of shared human experience. But arguably even more vital to increasing the planetary consciousness of literature studies is identifying and analyzing intercultural networks that negotiate relationships between people and environments, particularly relationships involving ecological degradation.106 This approach is imperative for several reasons. First, such an orientation more accurately reflects its eponym: “planet,” more than “globe” or “world,” points at once to the planet Earth and to the diverse and interacting bodies—tangible and intangible, human and nonhuman, biotic and abiotic, massive and microscopic in size and impact—that form, inhabit, and move across this sphere.107 Second,

as recent environmental justice and ecofeminist scholarship suggests, examining how creative works articulate interactions between humans and environments in fact deepens appreciations not only of these relationships but also of those among people.108 Third, and most important, scholarship on literature can help us develop deeper, more nuanced understandings of human/nonhumanPage 26 → contacts; these understandings have the potential to speed the cultural changes necessary for remediating damaged ecosystems, limiting further ecological degradation, and preserving human health. Ultimately, however, enhancing the planetary consciousness of literature goes beyond increasing the geographical breadth of scholarly research, and beyond moving the object of study from interactions among people to both these interactions and those between people and environments (i.e., intercultural networks of discourse on relationships between and among people and the nonhuman). It also involves assessing the environmental cosmopolitanism of these interactions: examining how individual literary works, even those that seem focused exclusively on very local environmental concerns, might increase consciousness of transnational and transcultural phenomena. Equally, it requires us to evaluate how literary treatments of widespread phenomena might increase awareness of concerns of smaller scope.109 I hope to contribute to increasing the planetary consciousness of literary studies by showing how creative works demonstrating the ambiguity of damaged environments, often in specific sites, position themselves and can be positioned as part of larger discourses.110 I also explore how creative texts featuring the ambiguous relationships among people and their surroundings on a global scale (e.g., eco-apocalyptic texts) might transform understandings of more situated phenomena.

Ecoambiguity In the following chapters I take up several hundred writers and texts from six continents—from Nobel Prize winners and others translated and celebrated around the world to individuals and creative products little known even in their own communities. This is only a fraction of the number that could have been discussed. Naturally, the texts I include can be analyzed in a variety of ways. Because I am writing from an ecological perspective and am focusing on networks of environmental ambiguity, my readings are often unconventional. Chapter 1 provides the historical and literary background for the analyses of creative works found in chapters 2–7. In the first chapter I discuss ecological transformations, crises, movements, and legislation in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan from earliest times to the present. I also introduce some of the region's most noteworthy literary treatments of environmental degradation, identifying trajectories of creative negotiations with ecological distress in these four East Asian lands from antiquity to the twenty-first century. I Page 27 →debunk stereotypes of East Asians as environmental stewards and of East Asian literatures as depicting only close relationships between people and the natural world. Readers interested in context will find Chapter 1 especially helpful for that purpose, whereas those eager to dive into analyses and close readings of individual texts should begin with Chapter 2 and turn to the first chapter as desired. chapters 2–7 discuss specific literary texts within the analytical framework developed in the introduction and the historical and literary context found in Chapter 1. The second through seventh chapters examine how literatures addressing environmental degradation—particularly those in East Asia—regularly grapple with ecological ambiguities. These chapters each begin with discussion of environmental concepts and close reading of a selected text, with special attention to matters of language and stylistics, before turning to broader literary analyses of a variety of other novels, short stories, poems, and essays. I group creative works not by nation, language, genre, style, date of publication, or environmental problems discussed, but instead according to the types of ecoambiguity displayed most prominently, acknowledging that these taxonomic categories frequently blur and dissolve into one another and thus often remain rather loose and slushy buckets. Consideration is paid throughout to the spatial and temporal implications of the phenomena addressed. The three chapters of Part I examine how literature negotiates disjunctions in attitudes, in information, and in behaviors. Chapter 2, “Accentuating Ambivalence,” takes up the relationship between devastated ecosystems and ambivalent human emotions, perceptions, and beliefs regarding animals, plants, and other parts of the natural world. It analyzes creative texts that depict people who at once proclaim they love nature and believe that it exists

primarily for human benefit, who celebrate both the grandeur and the destruction of the same nonhuman entity, or who simultaneously call for and denounce environmental regulations. This chapter begins with a brief look at the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao's poem “Hoshi o tabey yo” (Let's Eat Stars, 1988) and a close reading of the Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko's novel Kugai jdo: Waga Minamataby (Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land: Our Minamata Disease, 1969). It also includes analyses of the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima's short story “Zuihou de lieren” (The Last Hunter, 1987) and nativist writer Huang Chunming's “Fangsheng” (Set Free, 1987), as well as the Chinese writer A Cheng's novella Shu wang (King of Trees, 1985).111 I show how these and other works address the complex and often conflicting psychologies that accompany much environmental degradation. Even when ecosystems are severely damaged, data on them often are ambiguous. Page 28 →Interpretations of these data can be even more convoluted since so much is at stake, and so much remains unknown. Because the nonhuman regularly ebbs and regenerates regardless of human behaviors, environmental health frequently is difficult to determine. Chapter 3, “Underlining Uncertainty,” examines how ambiguous information about damage to the nonhuman is incorporated into a range of works, everything from texts that focus almost entirely on ecological devastation to those with only brief references to environmental change. This chapter analyzes creative discourse on the complexities of assessing the causes, extent, and significance of damage to environments, including collateral damage caused by human-on-human violence. It also probes literature that raises questions about environmental resilience and futures. Following a close reading of a poem by the Korean writer Kim Kwanggyu, I discuss poetry by Sakaki Nanao, the Korean writers Chng Hynjong and Ko n, and the Taiwanese writers Rongzi and Xin Yu, as well as prose by the Chinese writer Wang Ping.112 This chapter shows how literature portrays preconceptions and prejudices as shaping understandings of information on environments in complicated and often contradictory ways. With their reduced claims to accuracy, creative texts often expose and even exploit inconsistencies of information about changes to ecosystems. Although people have become more environmentally conscious over the last half century, we know surprisingly little about the etiologies, the patterns of progression and regression, and the consequences of damaged environments. Chapter 4, “Capitalizing on Contradiction,” discusses how creative works depict particular human behaviors as having inadvertent, unexpected, multiple, and contradictory results. This chapter also examines how literature portrays an individual's or a community's conflicting behaviors vis-à-vis environments and the frequently contradictory consequences of these behaviors. It likewise underlines how literature questions moral accountability for ecodegradation and emphasizes the difficulties of assessing behaviors as well as assessments of behaviors. After briefly examining a poem by the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho, I give a close reading of the Chinese-language writer Gao Xingjian's acclaimed novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain, 1989). Other texts explored include poetry by the Taiwanese writer Liu Kexiang; short stories by the Korean writer Hwang Sunwn and the Japanese writers Masuda Mizuko and Miyazawa Kenji; and essays by the Taiwanese writer and biologist Jia Fuxiang.113 Part II, similarly divided into three chapters, examines how literature grapples with acquiescence to environmental degradation (Chapter 5), illusions and delusions concerning ecological conditions (Chapter 6), and the limitations and dangers of green rhetoric (Chapter 7). Page 29 → Literature often features people who acquiesce to environmental devastation: their behaviors clash with empirical conditions in the sense that they do nothing to alleviate human and nonhuman suffering and sometimes increase both. Many creative texts include characters who simply look the other way when confronted with damaged ecosystems. These individuals often do so because they hunger for immediate profit and desire instant gratification. Other literary works portray people who are disturbed by what is happening to the environment but do nothing to repair existing damage or prevent further injury. They frequently react like this because they believe that damage is too extreme and social systems are too inflexible to permit change. Still other creative texts show how acquiescing to environmental devastation can be taken to its logical extreme. These works feature damage not only as going unchallenged but also as being accelerated, despite predictable consequences. Chapter 5,

“Acquiescing,” opens with a brief look at Masuda Mizuko's short story “Kagami” (Mirror, 1996), then gives close readings of the Japanese writer Tanikawa Shuntar's poem “Sora ni kotori ga inakunatta hi” (The Day Small Birds Disappeared from the Skies, 1977) and Ch’oe Sngho's poem “Mul wi e mul arae” (Below the Water That's above the Water, 1983). It also discusses dynamics of acquiescing to ecodegradation in poetry by the Korean writer Yi Hynggi and the Chinese writer Chen Jingrong; short stories by the Chinese writer Han Shaogong, the Japanese writer Tsutsui Yasutaka, and the Korean writer Cho Sehi; and the Chinese writer Jiang Rong's best-selling novel Lang tuteng (Wolf Totem, 2004).114 Chapter 5 focuses on how creative texts highlight discrepancies between human behaviors and environmental conditions, depicting behaviors that at best maintain the status quo and at worst increase damage to environments. Slightly shifting the focus, Chapter 6—“Illusions and Delusions”—looks closely at writing that draws attention to one of the greatest discrepancies between attitudes and conditions: our tendency to believe that our interactions with environments are as they should be, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Many literary works mock the human proclivity to insist that everything is “all right” even when confronted with nearly apocalyptic conditions. Other texts show how readily perceptions of environmental health can be manipulated; they feature characters who are easily convinced that ecosystems which appear damaged are in fact still healthy. Still others reveal the firmness and the fallacy of the belief that environments can sustain even the most extreme human behaviors. Chapter 6 begins with a close reading of the Taiwanese writer Bai Xianyong's “Anlexiang de yi ri” (A Day in Pleasantville, 1964), then discusses poetry by the JapanesePage 30 → writer Isakawa Masaomi and the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngja; short-short fiction by the Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi; and the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong's massive novel Huang huo (Yellow Peril, 1991).115 These and other literary works on (un) conscious disavowals of the severity of ecodegradation show how literature exposes the human tendency to minimize our shaping of environments. Creative texts that depict people damaging ecosystems regularly tackle one of the most sobering realities and greatest paradoxes of this degradation: respectful attitudes toward nonhuman species can lead to behaviors that injure and even destroy them. Popular environmental discourse often underscores the need to value the nonhuman, even learn to “love nature,” on the assumption that so doing will facilitate environmental health. Such attitudes frequently prompt actions that benefit ecosystems. Yet many literary works propose that even people who harbor benign attitudes can readily harm the natural world. The texts examined in Chapter 7, “Green Paradoxes,” identify the limits and dangers of environmental rhetoric, particularly its unexpected role in facilitating destruction of ecosystems. I begin with a close reading of Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, then discuss poetry by the Japanese writer Oguma Hideo and the Korean writers Ko n and Kim Kwanggyu; short stories by the Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming and the Japanese writers Dazai Osamu and Murakami Haruki; and two novels: the Japanese writer Abé Kb's Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1962) and Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril.116 The chapter concludes with brief words on the future of literary criticism—East Asian, environmental, comparative, and world—as well as the humanities more generally, on a planet that faces unprecedented environmental peril. I argue for a deeper planetary consciousness enhanced by comparative ecocritical scholarship. The ubiquity of environmental problems and the interdependence of all life make it especially vital that creative articulations of environmental degradation be read not only as part of national literatures but also in terms of intercultural thematic and conceptual networks. Ecodegradation occurs everywhere on the planet, with a temporal and geographic scope unsurpassed by any other pressing global concern. Environmental crises more than any other phenomena impel us to consider our lives and responsibilities in planetary terms.117 This book takes up a particularly thorny component of texts that feature damaged ecosystems—their ambiguity. Two of the most difficult yet potentially rewarding tasks facing scholars of literature and environment in the early twenty-first century are unpacking the complex ambiguities of these writings and analyzing their diverse cosmopolitan implications. Since its beginnings, literature has mediated ambiguous relationships between people and environments. Creative works can give us insight into some Page 31 →of our greatest challenges as we seek to understand the interactions of the local, the global, and everything in-between. Persistent environmental damage shows how extreme deference to local social norms has the potential to harm the entire planet, including the very people whose

customs are allegedly being respected. Such damage also demonstrates how excessive concern with planetary health risks compromising the local buy-in essential to balanced relationships among people and environments the world over. The creative texts examined in this book underline the ecoambiguity central to negotiating these and similar concerns. Most creative texts featuring human-induced harm to ecosystems do more than simply describe changes to environments. Not confining themselves to the “what” of ecological degradation, they also link these changes to changing social standards and institutions, as well as to ambiguous attitudes, behaviors, and conditions. They bring to light the contradictory implications and broader effects of change, as well as efforts to alter change. But by depicting environmental degradation as so deeply infused with ecoambiguity, what room do creative texts leave for improving the condition of people and the other forms of life with which we share the planet? In many ways, this question returns us full circle, underlining the inescapability of ambiguity in relationships among people and their environments. In literature as in the experienced world, no matter how much respect individuals and societies profess for landscapes, no matter how devoted they claim to be to securing the well-being of plants and animals, no matter how much they know about the damage particular behaviors cause to ecosystems, very few people have been willing to alter radically their own lifestyles. Perhaps, as many environmentalists have argued, ecological implosion is inescapable. But most creative texts, even eco-apocalyptic narratives, leave some uncertainty. And with this uncertainty come flexibility and possibility.

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ONE / Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia People's destruction of the Primal Forces of Yin and Yang [by plowing, felling, drilling, digging, and building] is even greater [than that of vermin]…People make it impossible for Heaven and Earth and the myriad things to attain their true state…In my opinion, if there were someone/something who could damage humanity and make them daily fewer and diminish by the year, and make the damage to the Primal Forces of Yin and Yang steadily decrease, then such an entity would be someone/something who had achieved merit for Heaven and Earth. —Liu Zongyuan, Tian shuo (Theory of Heaven, 814)1 More so than their counterparts in other areas of the world, premodern East Asian literatures, fine arts, religions, and philosophies frequently idealized abstract visions of the natural world and of human interactions with it.2 But as Theory of Heaven, one of East Asia's first radically environmental texts suggests, these representations more often defied than reflected empirical reality. This chapter highlights trajectories of environmental problems and literary engagements with them in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan from premodern times to the present, providing the ecological and creative contexts for the texts given closer readings in chapters 2–7. East Asian environmental histories are not well known outside the region, and East Asian literary negotiations with environmental problems even less so. Here I show Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers as far more attuned to environmental issues than has been previously understood in East Asia, not to mention elsewhere.3 The present chapter discusses the development of environmental consciousness in East Asian literatures, examining how these creative corpuses have addressed particular environmental problems (e.g., Page 33 →deforestation, pollution, and animal abuse). chapters 2–7 look at a subset of these texts: those that highlight the conceptual phenomenon of ecoambiguity. While Chapter 1 focuses primarily on identifying key environmental texts, subsequent chapters analyze individual works in greater detail with a focus on their paradoxical treatments of damaged ecosystems. Unlike the remainder of Ecoambiguity, this chapter divides environmental concerns and their literary treatments along national and then thematic lines. To be sure, many of Asia's environmental issues transcend national and often regional borders, whether literally (e.g., China's pollution blowing into Korea and flowing into Vietnam) or through parallel behaviors (e.g., the same agrochemicals used in Japan and Taiwan affecting the environments of these two lands in similar ways).4 It also goes without saying that East Asian countries face common global environmental problems, including species extinction, ozone depletion, and climate change. Likewise, many East Asian writers are familiar with the oeuvres of their counterparts from elsewhere in the region; despite diplomatic tensions and official conflicts, intra-East Asian literary consumption and transculturation, although uneven, have blossomed since the mid-twentieth century.5 Where relevant, these artistic connections are acknowledged, often in the notes. More important, as developed in chapters 2–7, much of the region's creative writing on ecodegradation belongs to intercultural conceptual networks of environmental ambiguity. On the other hand, ecodegradation and responses to it, including in literature, have followed different trajectories in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In addition, except for writers in Taiwan with strong familial ties to China, most East Asian creative artists have a clear sense of belonging to a single East Asian nation.6 Thus it is crucial to understand the local and national contexts in which both ecodegradation and literature have arisen before looking closely at the intercultural conceptual resonances of creative writing on ecological devastation in East Asia and beyond. Like most societies, East Asian peoples have an extensive history of using landscapes to their own benefit by reshaping, even exploiting them to meet (perceived) needs and satisfy desires. At the same time, in order to avoid depleting resources, East Asian individuals and communities have long accepted restrictions on helping themselves to nature's abundance. Nascent environmental consciousness in the region dates to well before the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, who famously declared: “If nets of fine mesh do not enter pools and ponds, there will be more fish and turtles than we can consume. If axes enter the hills and forests only at the proper times, there will be more wood than we can use” Cugu buru wuchi, yubie buke shengshi ye. Page 34 →Fujin yishi ru

shanlin, caimu buke shengyong ye).7 And radically environmental texts date at least to Liu Zongyuan's Theory of Heaven, which cites Liu's contemporary and fellow writer Han Yu as decrying human destruction of the Primal Forces of Yin and Yang by plowing plains, felling forests, and opening rivers and reservoirs. As cited at the beginning of this chapter, Han Yu argues provocatively that reducing the human population would benefit both heaven and earth. Not surprisingly, Liu Zongyuan is at a loss to respond to such a hypothesis. Han Yu's position is extreme, but his frustration is to a certain degree understandable. To be sure, human activity in East Asia often has been guided by what today is considered sustainable use—use that meets the requirements of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.8 Yet understandings of needs and the capacity of ecosystems to meet them vary widely and often do not comport with practical realities. Always in flux, relationships between people and environments became particularly lopsided during the twentieth century, when human populations burgeoned and people developed technologies to transform landscapes more rapidly, more radically, and on a larger scale than ever before. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization was generally celebrated in East Asia. With few exceptions, the relatively unfettered use of natural resources was central to the narrative of China's, Korea's, and Taiwan's modern economic development, as well as Japan's prosperous growth and overseas empire (1895–1945).9 Similar discourse surrounded postwar industrialization in the 1950s and early 1960s in Japan, in the 1960s–1970s in South Korea and Taiwan, and in China in the 1980s. During these decades people generally did not see themselves as significantly damaging environments. Ecosystems were believed so resilient, and their self-restorative powers so great in relation to human demands, that even such activities as disgorging toxic waste were not thought to matter much if at all. As environmental damage became more severe and widespread, this relative nonchalance receded, only to be replaced by a conviction that blighted environments were a necessary cost of rapid, sustained growth. Some triumphalists even argued that belching smokestacks signaled national prosperity. It was not until the late 1960s in Japan, the 1980s in South Korea and Taiwan, and the 1990s in China that a widely shared sense of ecological crisis emerged. This sentiment propelled citizens to organize and demand change, ultimately leading governments and enterprises to adopt policies intended to remediate present environmental damage and curb it in the future. Corporations generally supported such measures as good investments since they helped retain consumer confidence. Subsequent decades witnessed uneven improvements in Page 35 →environmental health and less tolerance for behaviors that blatantly damage ecosystems. Building on this momentum, a green fervor has permeated East Asia, with Taiwan's Green Party (Taiwan Lü Dang, Taioan Lek Tong, est. 1996), China's “Green Olympics” (Lüse aoyun; 2008), South Korea's “Green New Deal” (Noksaek nyudil; 2009), Japan's “Green New Deal” (Gurn nydru; 2009), and countless other “green” endeavors. But despite these steps and a widespread consciousness that current lifestyles are unsustainable, local, national, and regional environmental problems and crises continue. For their part, East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and for depicting people as intimately connected with the non-human world. But in fact, as this chapter reveals, much modern and even some premodern East Asian fiction and poetry portray people damaging if not destroying everything from small ponds to the entire planet; references to ecodegradation have appeared regularly in East Asian literatures since the late 1960s (in Japan and Korea) and 1980s (in China and Taiwan). Some creative works that discuss damage to ecosystems conform to conventional understandings of “nature writing” or “environmental/ecological writing,” at least in their place of origin, but many others do not. The tremendous variety of literature in twentieth- and twenty-first-century East Asia and through-out the world that addresses ecodegradation—incorporating references that occasionally celebrate, sometimes simply describe, and often condemn harmful changes to environments—testifies to the persistence of damaged environments and to the ecological consciousness, however diaphanous, of literary artists.

Environmental Degradation in China China's civilization is the oldest in East Asia and has the longest history of environmental damage. Belief in the continuity of being, that all forms of existence are organically connected, as well as emphases on holism and cosmic harmony, characterize how early Chinese understood relationships between people and nature.10 On the

other hand, even though their attitudes toward the nonhuman have changed significantly over time, Chinese for millennia have engaged in ecologically unsustainable practices.11 As Vaclav Smil has argued, “we cannot find any better example of human impacts on the environment than those provided by China's long quest to accommodate its growing population.”12 These changes include everything from massive deforestation to sizable hydroengineering projects such as canals, irrigation systems, and Page 36 →dams; from terracing of ever steeper slopes to technological developments that increasingly allowed Chinese to shape their environments.13 Elizabeth C. Economy has likewise observed: Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Buddhism [the leading schools of early Chinese thought] share a healthy respect for the importance and power of nature to shape [people's] conditions and prospects for a fruitful and prosperous life. Yet it is the Confucian belief in [people's] ability to shape nature to fulfill [their] needs that is most evident throughout Chinese history. The efforts of early environmental thinkers and officials were overwhelmed by the imperatives of war, economic development, and population growth. Thus, the continual cycles of social transformations, including war, population growth, economic development, and eco-environmental change resulted in astonishing levels of deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, and flooding.14 Economy's comments indicate that disjunctions between environmental attitudes and behaviors have long been prominent in China.15 Deforestation was one of China's earliest and most serious environmental problems. Settled agriculture there dates to approximately 5000 B.C.E., and perhaps as early as 8000 B.C.E.16 The eventual deforestation, at least by 1000 B.C.E., of China's uplands to support agriculture instigated centuries of silting and flooding and ranks among history's largest ecological blunders.17 Concerns about deforestation plagued Chinese officials well before the Common Era. According to “Rite of Zhou: Regional Officer” (dating to the Western Zhou), local governors were responsible for protecting forests, mountains, rivers, and animals from unnecessary abuse.18 Duke Mu of Shan, a court minister, commented in 524 B.C.E. that if forests are exhausted, people will be weakened and their farmland uncultivated. He thus urged that “the superior man should be concerned about this problem in a spirit of altruistic urgency, and without relaxation.”19 Particularly noteworthy is the duke's assertion that if not done judiciously, felling forests to make room for agriculture ultimately hinders crop production since agriculture depends on healthy woodlands. Deforestation proliferated despite such warnings. As Rhoads Murphey has observed, in China “shortages of timber, erosion of land, siltation of irrigation works and streambeds, and increased flooding were all apparent and commented on by the eighth century and multiplied during [the Song, 960–1279], when in addition to new capital cities and palaces made of wood, there was now a large navy and merchant fleet.”20 Page 37 → Maize production under the Song helped sustain the increasing population, but its spread accelerated soil erosion.21 China's economy continued to grow during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, leading to ever more deforestation, flooding, soil erosion, and desertification.22 At various junctures, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese leaders attempted to restrict new construction as well as access to forests, and to replant woodlands that had been felled.23 But market pressures and the needs of a growing population resulted in increased deforestation, including in Manchuria, despite initial Qing efforts to safeguard the region.24 Nineteenth-century Western travelers noted that most of China, including Hong Kong, had already been cleared.25 Although Han Chinese were responsible for most of the mainland's deforestation, creation myths of other ethnic groups also reveal intense transformation of environments. Ancient epic songs from the Miao (Guizhou Province, southwest China), for instance, speak of hillsides being burned to crack rocks and allow desired metals to “fall out.”26 Management of waterways also played a significant role in transforming Chinese landscapes. Throughout China's dynastic history, reining in the Yellow River was an important part of maintaining imperial legitimacy, since flooding or any disorder in the natural world was believed to signal the moral shortcomings of those in power.27 The main section of the Grand Canal was completed by the Sui (589–618), linking the Yellow and Yangzi rivers

by utilizing shorter waterways dating to the Eastern Zhou (771–221 B.C.E.). Subsequent dynasties extended the Grand Canal northeast to Beijing and south to Hangzhou. Vast webs of canals, dikes, levees, and irrigation ditches supported crop production throughout the imperial period, but they also disrupted animal and insect habitats. Expelling “wild animals” was likewise a central feature of early imperial culture. Helping King Wu of the Zhou dynasty displace the last sovereign of the Shang dynasty (1523–1045 B.C.E.), the Duke of Zhou is said to have driven out tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, and elephants. As a result, “the world was greatly delighted.”28 Over the centuries such behaviors resulted in the decimation and extinction of numerous species. People warned of the dangers of these practices. But population pressures and the desire for essentially unsustainable lifestyles meant that admonitions were seldom heeded in practice; instead the Chinese landscape was regularly marred and the earth habitually exhausted.29 The introduction of Western ideas about scientific forestry in the early twentieth century changed perceptions and aspirations. Chinese leaders began to promote conservation and afforestation, believing that protecting Page 38 →woodlands signaled development of a strong, modern state. But as before, policies were almost impossible to translate into practice. During the Republican period (1912–49), domestic conflicts and all-out war with Japan inflicted further damage to environments. Conditions only worsened under Mao Zedong, leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its founding in 1949 until his death in 1976.30 At first PRC officials tried to promote afforestation and restrict water usage, but with developing agriculture and industry the top priorities, and Mao's claim that people must “conquer nature” (ren ding sheng tian), conservation was quickly undermined. The Chinese Communist Party launched a literal “war on nature” to “defeat nature” (zhansheng ziran), declaring that “shock troops” were to reclaim grasslands and that wilderness was to be opened to plant grains (kaihuang zhong liang-shi). The battles against the natural environment that followed became some of the most extreme of their kind. China adopted Soviet-style plans for rapid development in the early 1950s, accelerating environmental degradation. For its part, the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) initiated tremendous land reclamation projects that ended up starving many millions of people and devastating forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes. Chinese were ordered to fell trees everywhere from the spaces around their homes to distant, already nearly barren hillsides. Campaigns to produce iron and steel in backyard furnaces hastened deforestation. People were exhorted to eliminate the “four pests” (chu si hai)—flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows—and to use harmful fertilizers and farm equipment.31 Reservoirs, dams, and irrigation projects ruined marine and often terrestrial ecosystems. Factories and power plants were built along rivers, which in the absence of treatment facilities were used for drainage. Not surprisingly, air, water, and soil pollution increased dramatically. Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) pursued its ideals via coercion, resulting in even greater damage to China's terrain. With few environmental regulations guiding agriculture and with industry now tarred as bourgeois and revisionist, ecological devastation increased dramatically. Those who cautioned restraint were exiled or killed. The emphasis on “opening wasteland” (kai huang) at the expense of millions of acres of forests and biodiversity led to severe land erosion, which resulted in a vicious cycle of increased deforestation just to maintain output.32 Judith Shapiro notes the similarities between Mao's project and those of earlier Chinese leaders—waterworks, land reclamation and conversion, deforestation—but then explains the vast differences: “[Mao's] effort to conquer nature was highly concentrated and oppositional, motivated by utopianism to transform the face of the earth and build a socialist paradise…The articulation of Page 39 →Mao's war against nature is striking for its overtly adversarial expression…it undermined aspects of traditional practice that fostered sustainable relationships with nature.”33 The death of Mao in 1976 ushered in a new era of Chinese interactions with both other societies and landscapes closer to home. Under the initial guidance of Deng Xiaoping, China transformed itself in a quarter century from one of the most impoverished countries in the world to an increasingly prosperous nation deeply integrated with the global economy.34 Living standards for millions have improved significantly, but the environmental cost has been high. Chinese leaders in the 1980s no longer spoke so explicitly of a war on nature and in fact issued propaganda posters urging people to “green the motherland” (lühua zuguo), “plant trees and make green” (zhishu

lühua), and “cherish greening and treasure old and famous trees” (aihu lühua zhenxi gushu mingmu).35 But believing ecological protection incompatible with economic growth, Chinese ultimately launched what amounted to significant attacks on their environments. To be sure, China's controversial one-child policy, instigated in the late 1970s, likely has slowed degradation of ecosystems.36 Also contributing to remediating environments are such groups as Ziran zhi You (Friends of Nature), China's first environmental nongovernmental organization. Founded in 1994 by Liang Congjie, who had been inspired by television reports of Greenpeace, Friends of Nature has worked with the Chinese government to encourage ecological responsibility, established China's first birdwatching group, and promoted environmental education in Chinese schools; in 1999 its undercover video of officials proposing to log illegally led Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to order a ban on such activities.37 Yet the nation's unchecked industrialization under Deng Xiaoping and subsequent leaders has resulted in some of the world's most polluted air and water. As of the first decade of the twenty-first century approximately one-third of China was affected by acid rain, groundwater was tainted in more than 90 percent of the nation's cities, more than 70 percent of its rivers and lakes were polluted, fully half of the water in its largest rivers was unusable, and 25 percent of Chinese lacked clean drinking water. With-out question, urbanization and economic growth are sending the nation on a collision course with a water crisis.38 Moreover, China's continued reliance on coal and charcoal stoves, as well as rapidly increasing car ownership, has resulted in ever more severe air pollution.39 The hydroelectric capacity of the Three Gorges Dam—a structure first proposed by Sun Yatsen in 1919, discussed by Chinese leaders throughout the twentieth century, and mainly constructed between 1993 and 2006—is expected to improve China's air quality by reducing sulfur dioxide and coal Page 40 →dioxide emissions, as well as by curbing the nation's coal consumption.40 The dam also will help control flooding along the Yangzi. But the environmental costs are substantial. Construction of the world's “biggest dam, biggest power plant, and biggest consumer of dirt, stone, concrete and steel” has forced approximately 1.2 million people from their homes, increased the likelihood of earthquakes and landslides in the region, exacerbated the effects of recent droughts, further jeopardized already endangered species including the Chinese alligator, Chinese sturgeon, Chinese tiger, giant panda, and Siberian crane, and led to the near extinction of the Yangzi river dolphin.41 Mountains of trash swept in during the floods of 2010 threatened one of the dam's key floodgates.42 China sees the Three Gorges Dam as an anchor in a group of hydropower “mega-bases” it has planned for the Yangzi, further cementing its status as the most dammed country on earth.43 To make matters worse, approximately 80 percent of household and industrial trash in China goes untreated and is not processed sustainably.44 More than one-fourth of the nation's land is now desert; desertification rates have doubled since the 1970s, and threats to biodiversity continue to grow.45 The Chinese government has announced numerous environmental laws, regulations, and policies that when implemented have enjoyed at least limited success.46 But efforts to curb environmental degradation are often ignored in favor of economic growth or in some cases simple survival.47 On the other hand, Chinese citizens are becoming less tolerant of living under such conditions and are growing increasingly demonstrative over the industrial poisoning of both themselves and their ecosystems.48 Peter C. Perdue has argued that, with their country facing real environmental crises, Chinese in coming decades might well mobilize to protest ecological damage, just as in the past they have openly expressed frustration with their leaders for not protecting citizens against internal upheaval, foreign invasion, and natural disasters.49 Chinese now publish numerous periodicals on environmental protection.50 As in other parts of East Asia, universities in China are increasingly offering courses in environmental studies, and even elementary schools are incorporating environmental education into their curricula.51 Twenty-first-century communications technology is also playing an important role: blogs and especially text messages are more and more used to spotlight the dangers of proposed projects and ultimately to organize demonstrations.52 These environmentalist efforts have also addressed China's contributions to a number of regional and global ecological problems. The rapid expansion of China's Gobi Desert has led to ever more severe sand and dust storms, principal carriers of China's industrial pollution to Korea and Japan. As a result, the environmental ministers of China, South Korea, and Japan formed a Page 41 →yellow-dust monitoring network in 2002, and in May 2006 they established the Northeast Asia Anti-Sandstorm Alliance, two months after Seoul was covered in a blanket of yellow dust blown in from China.53 Dams in China have wreaked destruction not only in the nation

itself but also in Southeast Asia, most notably along the Mekong River,54 while Central Asian nations, particularly Kazakhstan, have felt threatened by Chinese requests to till their soil.55 From Afghanistan to Africa and South America Chinese are tearing down mountains and relocating entire towns to mine copper and other minerals.56 Chinese have been farming in Africa for years, and in the mid-2000s the Chinese government began prioritizing large-scale agricultural investment in the continent, with hopes of expanding China's food supply and thus augmenting food security, as well as alleviating population pressures.57 Even more significant is China's expansive investment in African oil extraction to accommodate the nation's ever-increasing energy needs.58 Chinese are involved in dam projects, often controversial, in nearly fifty countries, from Myanmar (Burma) to Turkey, the Sudan, Gabon, and Ecuador; Chinese companies are currently building nineteen of the world's twentyfour largest hydropower stations.59 China is the world's greatest contributor of ozone-depleting substances and one of its major emitters of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; it also is one of the leading importers of timber from tropical rain forests.60 Compounding its ecological morass, China imports mountains of untreated garbage from the United States and elsewhere and is home to industries employing technologies illegal in their country of origin.61 Clearly financial profits come first in this stage of development, a pattern seen in most industrializing economies, whether capitalist, socialist, or as in China mixed ownership. But Chinese landscapes also are being devastated by global warming caused by many of the world's industrialized nations. In the spring of 2010 the nation's southwest suffered its worst drought since the Ming dynasty; conditions were so extreme that Guizhou Province's Huang-guoshu waterfall, Asia's largest and a popular tourist destination, was turned off every night to conserve water. Scientists suspect that climate change has radically changed patterns of precipitation here and elsewhere in China.62

Chinese Literature and Environmental Degradation References to the natural world abound in early Chinese literature. They appear prominently in the Shijing (Classic of Poetry, 600 B.C.E.), China's first poetry anthology, whether as straightforward presentations, metaphorical images, or evocative descriptions.63 Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) yuefu (Music Page 42 →Bureau poetry) on capital cities and royal palaces and parks extensively enumerate flora and fauna. Part of imperial ideological construction, these texts “[presented] the royal dwelling place as a microcosm for the whole universe.”64 The Six Dynasties (222–589) yielded the first distinct genres of Chinese landscape poetry. During this period flora and fauna were socially, religiously, and philosophically idealized in poetry of seclusion, including in the work of Zuo Si; farmstead poetry (tianyuan shi; lit. poetry of fields and gardens), particularly in the oeuvre of Tao Yuanming; and landscape poetry (shanshui shi; lit. poetry of mountains and waters), most notably in the writings of Xie Lingyun.65 Fostering the development of these genres were the loss of northern China to “barbarians,” who drove China's artist-intellectuals from office and forced them to the mountainous southeast; renewed attention to Daoist thought, which encouraged withdrawal and tranquility; and the embrace of elements of Indian Buddhism.66 Much Six Dynasties verse was also inspired by frustration with existing social conditions, with spaces distant from concentrated human habitation exerting special appeal.67 Different forms of farmstead, landscape, and recluse poetry remained part of the Chinese literary canon until the twentieth century; China's landscape poetry is arguably the world's earliest extensive creative engagement with the nonhuman.68 Nature takes many different guises and serves many different functions in early Chinese literature: as mood setter, as microcosm of the universe, as antagonist or refuge, as foil, as metaphor, as allegory, and as object of celebration, comparison, and contemplation.69 Scholarship on depictions of nonhuman phenomena in early Chinese literature stresses their aestheticism, even artificiality; many texts are described as more visionary than visual in their portrayal of environments. At the same time, a preoccupation with linguistic construction and stylistics often obscures early Chinese literature's attention to human injury to physical landscapes. Although greatly outnumbered by representations of ecological abundance, portraits of anthropogenically damaged or destroyed landscapes occupy an important position in the premodern Chinese literary corpus, especially poetry. On the other hand, unlike much late twentieth-century creative work on the topic, early Chinese literature is more likely to celebrate than to bemoan, much less condemn, human changes to environments. Even texts that express delight, reverence, and sensitivity vis-à-vis landscapes sometimes also rejoice in their (partial) capitulation. References to deforestation are sprinkled throughout premodern Chinese literature. This is evident from the

Classic of Poetry, which was compiled during the Zhou (1045–221 B.C.E.), a dynasty founded on the clearing of landscapes.70 “Zaishan” (Mowing Grasses), one of the two agrarian hymns Page 43 →in the Classic of Poetry celebrating the agrarian cycle, stresses that the first step of this cycle is clearing away grasses and trees; the poem applauds people for replacing less desirable flora with grains.71 Even more enthusiastic about this form of human manipulation of environments are selections in the Classic of Poetry such as the following: Hating the excesses of the Xia and Yin Heaven looked around and turned its sights to the west, and there it gave an abode to the Zhou. We cleared them and got rid of them, the dead trees that still stood and those that had fallen. We pruned and flattened bushes and trees that grew closely together. We opened and cleared them the tamarisks and the cane trees. We cleared away and cut wild mulberry trees. Heaven transferred the bright virtue from Yin to Zhou, their customs and virtue became grand. Heaven established a counterpart on earth, the given appointment became solid. Heaven examined the mountains, the various oaks were uprooted, the pines and cypresses were cleared, here Heaven made a state.72 Far from censuring the Zhou as excessive like the Xia and Yin in their own reshaping of landscapes, Heaven instead rejoices at these changes, recognizing them as having legitimized the new dynasty. The poem enumerates the many types of trees that have been cut and cleared, highlighting biodiversity loss: dead and fallen trees, those growing thickly together, tamarisks and canes, wild mulberries, various types of oaks, and pines and cypresses. Interestingly, the more sunlight that reaches the soil, as opposed to the treetops, the brighter the virtue; the fewer the trees and the less dense the vegetation, the more solid the appointment. Clearing land became an important marker of becoming civilized; peoples the Chinese perceived as barbarians called attention to their deforesting prowess as proof of their own progress. Other early Chinese poetry, such as the exiled Xie Lingyun's famed Page 44 →“Shanju fu” (Exposition on Dwelling in the Mountains) which celebrates the wonders of lush nature and harmonious interactions between people and the landscape, simply mentions felling trees. But when deforestation notably changes environments

and threatens human well-being, creative texts not surprisingly explicitly lament it. A poem by the late-Ming writer Jiang Tingyi comments: In the courtyard are many grasses and weeds, beneath the stairs are many pines and bamboos. In the morning we gather the fuel to cook our breakfast, and in the evening we take more to cook our dinner gruel. It's easy to exhaust the pines and bamboos, and the grasses and weeds don't grow enough… When we traveled through the mountains last month, the trees on the mountains appeared to pile up together, but now that we've come down from the mountains, we see afar they're sharp and bare. The farmers have nothing to use as fuel, so they set on fire the axles of their water carts.73 This text is based on a landscape (the lower Yangzi region) that had been subjected to millennia of human transformations and that during the seventeenth century was chronically incapable of meeting human demands. The poem suggests that people have razed surrounding landscapes neither out of hubris nor over time, but that they have done so quickly with no objective other than stoking their cookfires. Most interesting are the opening six lines translated above and given here in the Chinese: (tingzhong duo caolai) / (jiexia duo songzhu) / (chao qu chui chencan) / (ye shi zhu xizhou) / (songzhu yi yi jin) / (caolai sheng bu zu). The first two characters of the first two lines identify location (in the courtyard, tingzhong; beneath the stairs, jiexia), the third character indicates quantity (many, duo), and the fourth and fifth characters specify what is plentiful (grasses and weeds, caolai; pines and bamboo, songzhu). The following two lines, not surprisingly, reveal that people have no difficulty obtaining fuel for their morning and evening cookfires. But then conditions suddenly change. The fifth and sixth lines claim that these grasses and weeds, Page 45 →pines and bamboo, in fact are easily depleted (yi yi jin) and do not grow sufficiently (sheng bu zu). What seemed so plentiful actually is far from adequate. Depicting the inability of environments to meet human needs, Jiang Tingyi's poem underlines people's complete dependence on fragile ecosystems that appear to give little warning of their imminent collapse. Other premodern Chinese literature suggests that the only thing preventing animals and plants from being destroyed by humans is their perceived uselessness. The Tang poet Du Fu's “Gu bo xing” (Ballad of the Ancient Cypress), for instance, features massive ancient trees, at which people and their oxen gaze but which they nevertheless do not fell when wood is needed to rebuild their great halls: “[The tree] would not object to being cut / but who would be able to send it?…/ It has always been true that the greatest timber is hardest to put to use.”74 “Ballad of the Ancient Cypress” is the most famous poetic articulation of the metaphor of timber as talent. But the relationship that texts deploying this metaphor identify between people and trees also can be read more literally. This is particularly true of Tang poet Liu Zongyuan's “Xing lu nan” (Troubles on the Road), which describes profligate squandering of natural resources and points to similar wasting of human talent: The axes of officials charged with managing the forests have spread through a thousand hills,

At the orders of the Work Department they're lumbering and hacking posts and beams For every ten trunks chopped in the depths of the forests, only one gets taken away… Trees of tremendous height and girth block the path Wood all over tumbling, flames on the hillsides burning, The remaining shrubs are completely unprotected, Trampled over, how could ravines and valleys exist? A group of unused wood dies young, Thrusting mountains and deep gorges now empty cliffs and ranges.75 Although highlighting the poet's own position as an exiled government official, the line “For every ten trunks chopped in the depths of the forests, only one gets taken away” also points to needless destruction of timber. In contrast with Jiang Tingyi's poem, where people search desperately for wood to take home, “Troubles on the Road” states explicitly that only a small fraction of chopped trees are actually hauled away. Liu Zongyuan's poem then makes clear the long-term consequences of such activities.76 Imperial Chinese writers also expressed concern for the welfare of animals. Page 46 →The speaker of Xie Lingyun's “Dwelling in the Mountains” is proud that he has never hunted or fished and instead finds pleasure in caring for animals.77 Poems and jottings by the Tang literatus Bai Juyi and the Song literatus Su Shi suggest that scholarly elite of the middle imperial period occasionally freed animals from captivity, sparing their lives.78 But from the 1580s the custom of saving animals became more entrenched among the literati. As Joanna F. Handlin Smith has argued: More than ever before, members of the scholarly elite recorded how they, upon spotting a pig in the hands of a butcher or a chicken up for sale, hastily bought the hapless creatures and set them free. They also wrote much about their concern for animals—not just for the oxen whose labors were so valued in tilling the fields, but for birds and fish, tortoises and tiny insects; not just for plump animals destined for the cooking pots, but for irksome flies and poisonous scorpions.79 Handlin Smith sees this new sensibility as arising not simply from increasing social instability, a growing economy, and a deepening spiritual quest but also from “literati attempts to maneuver and redefine themselves in an increasingly complicated society.”80 The theme of “liberating lives” became an important element of didactic tales and other writings in the late Ming and early Qing. Qing authors also devoted increased attention to other forms of ecodegradation, demonstrating strengthened environmental consciousness. Poems included in Zhang Yingchang's edited volume Qing shi duo (Qing Bell of Poesy, 1869) are particularly noteworthy. For instance, Wang Taiyue's “Tong-shan yin” (Laments of the Copper Hills) describes the difficulties of miners confronted by deforestation and increasingly scarce mineral reserves: The mining paths go deeper and deeper with every day… What once was just a morning's work, now takes at least ten days. The lumber too has grown increasingly scarce, the woodlands resemble clean-shaven heads. For the first time they regret that all this logging, day after day

has left them without the firewood they need… So fertile are the hills and seas that it seems ridiculous to ask whether they flourish only when protected by disaster… Page 47 → But if people take everything, if they have no restraint, then they will exhaust heaven and earth.81 Read literally, the poem's concern extends beyond the mines and nearby woodlands to the biosphere more generally. Unlike much early East Asian literature, “Laments of the Copper Hills” depicts not a flourishing environment, nor even one whose damaged areas are relatively contained, but instead a world threatened by an increasingly robust and ravenous human population. The poem acknowledges that calls for caution might appear absurd, but it stresses that people in fact have the capacity to wreak irreparable harm. Wang Taiyue's poem and similar texts laid the foundation for twentieth-century Chinese creative negotiations with local, national, and eventually regional and global environmental degradation. Literature of the Republican period is sprinkled with references to human abuse of the natural world. For instance, the narrator of Lu Xun's prose poem “Qiuye” (Autumn Night, 1924), the opening selection of his Yecao (Wild Grass, 1927), speaks of a date tree with branches that “are still hanging low, nursing the injuries to their bark made by sticks used to beat down the dates.”82 Lu Xun's narrator is not as upset by these injuries as writers such as Thoreau, who chastises himself for throwing rocks at a chestnut tree to make the nuts fall: “It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us.”83 Although some branches must tend to their wounds, “Autumn Night” makes it clear that the trees can easily withstand what people inflict on them: freed of leaves and fruit, most of the branches “yawn and stretch comfortably” (qianshen de hen shufu), while some even pierce the sky and moon, so forcefully that the latter is said to go into hiding. At the same time, the narrator reveals sensitivity toward more fragile species. In the tender concluding lines of the poem he watches the insects that have come to rest on a nearby paper shade: “Like sunflower seeds with their large heads and small tails, they're only half the size of a grain of wheat, the dark green of their whole body adorable, pitiable. I yawn, light a cigarette, puff out the smoke, and facing a lamp pay silent respect to these verdant exquisite heroes.”84 The text suggests that the most delicate parts of the landscape—human and nonhuman—perhaps are its greatest hope. Early twentieth-century China's most prominent creative figure, Lu Xun abandoned his medical studies in Japan to become a full-time writer; he believed that changing people's spirits (gaibian tamen de jingshen) was more important than healing their physical bodies and that literature was the most effective means of doing so.85 Lu Xun was far more concerned with human than nonhuman suffering. His texts, including the selections in Wild Grass, highlight the many absurdities of human existence, with nature frequently functioning as background or Page 48 →metaphor. But sensitivity to his people's plight occasionally intermingled with sympathy for, and admiration of, the natural world. More noteworthy from an environmental perspective is Shen Congwen's “Wuge jun’guan yu yige meikuang gongren” (Five Army Officers and a Coal Miner, 1934). Set among the coal mines of western Hunan, this essay features a rogue miner who murders a sentinel and then leads a group of desperate individuals who take over a mountain town. The narrator focuses primarily on the deleterious effects of mines on people: blackened miners daily risk their lives in unstable shafts. He gives no indication that a nearby river has been polluted by the mines. On the other hand, he portrays the rogue miner as dropping the murdered sentinel into a pit “half filled with black water.”86 Human activities darken the landscape, but only on the smallest of scales. A key figure of native soil literature (xiangtu wenxue), Shen Congwen is known primarily for his writings on imagined native communities. He reconfigures China as a country based not on nation, race, or unified strength but instead on the comforts of native spaces and local diversity.87 Native soil literature stems from the deep concern of writers with their home regions, concern they often feel acutely only after being uprooted and no longer able to experience “home” directly. As David Derwei Wang has noted, this is “literally and rhetorically a rootless literature…whose meaning

hinges on the simultaneous (re)discovery and erasure of the treasured image of the homeland.”88 Creative discussions of the homeland rarely centered on environmental woes, but they did touch on many of them. Broader damage to environments is suggested in such texts as Mu Shiying's “Shanghai de hubuwu” (Shanghai Foxtrot, 1932). This fragmented short story, offering slivers of Shanghai street and dance hall life circa 1930, incorporates many of the experiments with language, space, and time that characterize Chinese, Japanese, and European modernist writings. “Shang-hai Foxtrot” most obviously points to the great human sacrifices made to construct a technologically advanced city: “The corpse is removed. In the empty lot: ditches horizontal and vertical, steel bones, debris, still a pile of his blood. On the blood, spread cement, build up steel bones, a new restaurant rises up! A new dance hall rises up! A new hotel rises up! Take his strength, take his blood, take his life crushed beneath.”89 But the story also speaks briefly of the damage this built environment inflicts on its natural counterpart. In the early lines the narrator describes the moon as illuminating a large “ashen plain.”90 Near the end he comments: “The Eastern sky, sunlight, like a golden eyeball opening its eyes in crow-black clouds.”91 The former reference suggests soil pollution and the latter could indicate air pollution. At the same time, the moon is said to shine brightly despite both air pollution and Page 49 →Shanghai's powerful strobes, which pulsate throughout the story; “Shanghai Foxtrot” depicts moonlight and sunlight as still fully able to withstand modern technology. Like most other early and mid-twentieth-century Chinese writers, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Mu Shiying feature environments that are not grievously harmed by human behaviors.92 This trend continued into the postwar period, although there are numerous exceptions, including Chen Jingrong's poem “Dushi huanghun jijing” (City Scene at Dusk, 1946), which begins: “The noises of the city have drowned dusk.” Urban clamor is strong enough to drown an entire segment of the day. Subsequent lines reveal that it also has torn apart the city's “nerves.”93 Chinese literary production after the founding of the PRC (1949) generally followed Mao Zedong's Yan’an Talks (1942), which aimed to establish political and ideological uniformity within the party and rein in dissenting artists: writers were to fuse their thoughts and feelings with those of the masses, make their language and style accessible to them, and help them “propel history forward”; literature was subordinated to the party's revolutionary tasks, but it also was “an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause.”94 Thus between the 1950s and the 1970s Chinese wrote a good deal on the destruction of their environments.95 Among the best-known texts in this vein and echoing Mao's exhortation to eliminate the “four pests” is Guo Moruo's “Zhou maque” (Cursing the Sparrow, 1958). The first two-thirds of this poem enumerate the bird's many faults, while the final third declares, “You've been evil for several thousand years / Today it's time to settle it all. / We’ll shoo you out, hit you, poison you, attack / and in the end throw you in the flames / and put you in ashes with your five bad traits [wuqi].”96 When it accuses birds of being plagues on society the poem is speaking as much about wayward officials as it is about animals. But at this time attacks on birds were not simply rhetorical. Other references to damaged environments are more subtle. The socialist-realist fiction that came to dominate cultural production between 1949 and 1966 often celebrates the beauties of the Chinese landscape, but it also alludes to damaged environments.97 For instance, Yang Mo's lengthy novel Qingchun zhi ge (The Song of Youth, 1958), the archetype of revolutionary realist and romanticist fiction, opens with a young girl aboard the BeijingShenyang train marveling at the thriving landscapes through which she passes; the fields are jade green, the skies are blue, the seas sparkle. Yet when she exclaims to a porter that he is fortunate to live so close to such a beautiful body of water, he responds, “What's so great about it? If we don't catch any fish we won't have anything to eat, and we won't notice whether it's beautiful or not.”98 It is possible that the porter is referring to the perennial chanciness Page 50 →of fishing, but his rapid dismissal of the girl's exuberance suggests that there might be something more at stake. It is possible that this landscape's radiant surfaces conceal empty insides.99 The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was marked by a relative dearth of literary production, but the liberalization of cultural policy following Mao's death in 1976 resulted in an outpouring of Chinese creative expression.100 Largely freed from the ideological assumptions of Maoist discourse, in the late 1970s and 1980s writers experimented with critical realism, modernist literary styles, romantic self-expression, and the avant-garde; they published in a number of intertwining literary genres, including Misty Poetry (menglong shi; obscure poetry, highly personal modernist-style poetry), scar literature (shanghen wenxue; fiction on the psychological traumas of the Cultural

Revolution), roots-seeking literature (xungen wenxue; fiction seeking return to China's indigenous cultures), and the avant-garde (postmodern fiction challenging modernity's narrative of self, progress, and enlightenment). In contrast, the decade following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 first witnessed “soft” cultural suppression and then culture's commoditization and commercialization, as well as a return to realist, particularly urban, fiction.101 References to ecological degradation appear in most of the above types of post-Mao Chinese literature, including the roots-seeking literature of Jia Pingwa and Han Shaogong.102 Also noteworthy in the last three decades has been the growth of explicitly environmental literature, which first was termed huanjing wenxue (lit. environmental literature) or lüse wenxue (lit. green literature), and then shengtai wenxue (lit. ecological literature). In the 1980s, Chinese writers distinguished their “environmental literature” from Japan's and other nations’ “pollution literature, ” arguing that the Chinese strove not only to expose individuals and behaviors that damaged environments but also to extol environmental protection efforts.103 Chinese “environmental literature” has been defined as literature that “arouses people's love of nature and anxiety toward the deterioration of the environment.”104 For its part, Chinese “ecological literature” has been defined as literature that “reflects the relationship between the ecological environment and the development of human society” and literature that “takes as its subject environmental protection.”105 Regardless of terminology, late twentieth-century Chinese literary interest in environmentalism can be traced to the Shen Congwen boom of the 1980s; Chinese were moved by Shen's impressionistic documentations of local places and cultures as well as his depictions of beautiful Chinese landscapes. Shen Congwen's early twentieth-century output was especially Page 51 →popular with writers of roots-seeking literature, who sought inspiration in regional customs, ethnic minorities, and other marginal groups, and in the countryside and nature more generally. To be sure, in roots-seeking literature the natural world generally is discussed as determining ethnic and personal identities, not in terms of landscapes harmed by human behaviors.106 And excitement with Shen Congwen's literature resulted from fatigue with politics, not with technology; Chinese generally were delighted with the industrialization and economic growth of their nation in the 1980s.107 But prosperity was accompanied by further damage, prompting some writers to look more deeply at human interactions with the nonhuman. At this time Chinese also began translating such American environmental classics as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, both of which found a wide audience.108 The degree to which a Chinese text needs to engage with environmental matters for a Chinese critic to consider it “environmental literature,” “green literature,” or “ecological literature” varies. More significant is the diversity of Chinese texts that talk about damaged ecosystems, addressing such problems as soil and air pollution, deforestation, desertification, water shortages, flooding, pollution, species extinction, and global warming.109 A key example of 1980s Chinese environmental fiction is A Cheng's novella Shu wang (King of Trees, 1985), which discusses devastation to China's ecosystems during the Cultural Revolution.110 Shen Rong's Sihe (A Dying River, 1985), focuses more on environmental protection, celebrating efforts to control the pollution of Mata Lake in Shandong Province.111 Also noteworthy from the 1980s are writings such as Gao Xingjian's drama Yeren (Wild Man, 1985) and novel Soul Mountain (1989), Han Shaogong's short story “Nü nü nü” (Woman, Woman, Woman, 1986), and Su Tong's short story “Shu nong” (The Brothers Shu, 1988). Su Tong's text focuses on Shu family relationships, but it also draws attention to the pollution plaguing their southern Chinese town. Early in the story the narrator alerts readers that the river crossing the legendary Fragrant Cedar Street will appear several times in his narrative, “probably without meaning, since as I said, I’m only relaying impressions [yinxiang].”112 The impressions the narrator gives of the tributary running through their neighborhoods are of a body damaged beyond repair; the river in fact is far from meaningless. Remarking that circumstances here are typical of this part of China, the narrator notes: Even after a century had passed, the people still cherished the memory of the river that cuts through our southern city…I remember that Page 52 →once the water became polluted, it never again turned clear. It was black and smelled terrible. The river seemed to be the city's natural drain—floating on its surface were rotten leaves, dead cats and dead rats, greasy industrial dirt, and a steady stream of condoms.

This is the scenery of the south. Why were there people singing on the riverbanks?…Fragrant Cedar Street didn't know. Fragrant Cedar Street, which ran along the banks of the river, didn't know at all.113 People are deeply attached to the river, but it appears as though they do nothing to attempt to restore it to its former state; once polluted it never again becomes clear (houlai de heshui bu fu qingcheng). Later the narrator reveals that conditions are continuing to deteriorate: the river drowns people, but there is no way to “penalize” it for so doing, since pollution has already “punished” it severely. Nonhuman revenge plays a larger role in such creative texts as Zheng Yi's novel Shenshu (Wondrous Tree, 1996), which features a protagonist who gives his life for an ancient, magnificent tree. Not long after both he and the tree are slaughtered, a landslide engulfs his village. A harsh critic of the Communist Party and a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests, Zheng Yi left China in 1992 and now resides in the United States; because his work is banned on the mainland, he publishes in Taiwan. Many of his texts have been translated into Japanese, including Wondrous Tree (trans. 1999), and they have received rave reviews from Japanese writers such as the Nobel Prize–winning author e Kenzabur, who met with Zheng Yi during his year at Princeton University (1996–97).114 In a conversation with e shortly after the publication of Wondrous Tree, Zehng Yi commented that the tree in this novel represents the “agony of the people” and claimed that e employs the same technique in his trilogy Moeagaru midori no ki (Flaming Green Tree, 1993–94).115 There is no question that in Wondrous Tree, as in e's trilogy, nonhuman suffering stands in for its human counterpart, but both texts expose how ruthlessly people treat the natural world. Chinese nonfiction writing on environmental crises similarly blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s, branching off from the broader genre of reportage literature.116 One of the most cited writings from this period is Xu Gang's narrative “Famuzhe, xing lai!” (Loggers, Wake Up!, 1987), which describes the destruction of woodlands and other ecosystems across China and the farreaching, lethal consequences of current forestry practices the world over.117 Also significant are the writings of Dai Qing, a Tiananmen Square protester and one of China's most vocal and prolific opponents of the Three Gorges Dam. Dai Qing, trained as an engineer in China and Japan, wrote some Page 53 →fiction but made larger marks in journalism and reportage. While in Hong Kong in 1987 she learned about the potential social and environmental consequences of the planned Three Gorges Dam. Horrified, she published reports that exposed its likely local, national, and global reach. These include the essay collections Changjiang! Changjiang! (Yangzi! Yangzi!, 1989) and Shuilong lai le! (The River Dragon Has Come! , 1997). Dai Qing also brought public attention to the role human behaviors played in the great China fire of 1987. This conflagration, which has been called one of the largest in world history, burned millions of acres of conifer forest (10 percent of the world's reserves) in Heilongjiang Province along the Sino-Soviet border.118 Concerned with ecological degradation and hoping to develop the genre of environmental literature in China, in January 1991 Chinese writers founded the Huanjing Wenxue Yanjiuhui (Society of Environmental Literature); this group was established nearly two years before The Association for the Study of Literature & Environment (ASLE), the United States’ premier organization for the study of literature and environment that now has branches worldwide.119 The following year Chinese established Lüye (Green Leaves), China's first journal devoted to environmental literature, which in five years published more than a thousand environmental texts and continues to flourish to this day.120 In their opening issue, the organizers of Green Leaves speak of their admiration for Rachel Carson and the impact of her Silent Spring; they stress the need to increase global dialogue on environmental degradation.121 Not surprisingly, it was also at this time that Chinese began publishing anthologies of “green” literature, making more accessible writing deemed to be of urgent national and planetary significance.122 The twenty-first century has so far proven fertile for Chinese literature on human damage to ecosystems. One of the new millennium's first such novels was Jia Pingwa's Huainianlang (Remembering Wolves, 2000). This text features Gao Ziming, a journalist and environmentalist who returns to Shangzhou in central China and together with two hunters sets out to document the region's fifteen remaining wolves. Instead, the group ends up killing these animals. Most notable is the blurring of boundaries between people and wolves, even the metamorphosis of one into the other.123 Also writing on relationships between wolves and people is Jiang Rong, whose Wolf Totem

won numerous literary prizes and has sold in the millions in China alone; this novel has been translated into more than fifteen languages, including both Korean (2006) and Japanese (2007). In China, Wolf Totem inspired a “wolf boom” as well as Internet debates on Chinese nationalism and treatment of minorities. It likewise has prompted people to think more closely about the relationships between Chinese and the natural world more generally.124 Part Page 54 →of the novel's great appeal especially abroad are its exposés of environmental damage. In the editor's note to the Japanese translation of Wolf Totem An Boshun calls attention to the ecological significance of Jiang Rong's novel, commenting that “at a time when nature is being destroyed, the number of species is decreasing, and the human spirit and character are day by day getting weaker and becoming ever more corrupt, modern readers are truly lucky to be able to read a long, epic novel like this that describes wolves.”125 We are fortunate that novels such as Wolf Totem have been received so enthusiastically, and it will be interesting to watch how Chinese literature continues to grapple with environmental crises present, past, and future.126 In sum, in the past quarter-century writing on environmental problems has become an important part of Chinese literary production. And not surprisingly, both the increased concern of Chinese writers with environmental degradation and the burgeoning of ecocriticism in American academic discourse have led to an upswing in Chinese ecocritical scholarship, first on Anglophone and now increasingly on Sinophone literature.127 Trends in creative writing have been accompanied by similar phenomena in film and the visual arts.128 Chinese authors and other artists have not been deceived by official rhetoric on “greening” environments. Nor have they been duped by popular discourse on Chinese “love” of nature. Instead, they have called attention to the many challenges facing China's environments and the fundamental ambiguities underlying much ecodegradation. Some of the works mentioned above and many other modern Chinese writings are examined in more detail in subsequent chapters below.

Environmental Degradation in Preindustrial Korea and Japan People have lived on the Korean peninsula for 30,000 years and the islands of Japan for at least 20,000 years, but early forager populations had little effect on the region's ecosystems. Cropping entered the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago in approximately 2,000 B.C.E. and 500 B.C.E., respectively; in both spaces metallurgy followed some centuries later.129 Scholars date the first “dramatic and permanent modification of Japanese woodland” to 300 B.C.E.130 But it was not until around 700 C.E., when agricultural practices had developed sufficiently to support consolidated ruling elites in new political centers with dense populations and high timber consumption, that the first obvious strains on ecosystems emerged in each country. Most noteworthy were the deterioration of hillsides, soil erosion, and downstream Page 55 →flooding, consequences of excessive land clearance, deforestation, and mining.131 Capital cities placed new demands on ecosystems, not only for their initial construction but also for maintenance, repair, and replacement of structures, often after fires.132 Flora and fauna changed in Japan's and Korea's lowlying areas as the human-centered biological community (people, domestic animals, and parasites) thrived at the expense of other species. But these alterations ultimately increased biological diversity. From all accounts, damage to environments at this time was sufficiently modest that it inspired little meliorative response.133 By 1350 aristocratic bureaucracy had flourished and faded in Korea and Japan. The next five centuries saw continued land reclamation and deforestation in both countries as well as agronomic intensification including increased use of fertilizers.134 In Japan, urbanization and famines, particularly during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), made it increasingly apparent that contemporary treatment of environments could not be sustained; although many continued to blame fate, the gods, and the weather for the near ecological collapse, intellectuals such as the physician And Sheki censured government policies and human behaviors.135 Tokugawa officials took some steps to increase sustainability, constructing waterworks and reforesting hillsides.136 The presence of large mountain regions meant that much of Korea and Japan remained relatively unaffected by human behaviors, but areas most accessible to people were plagued by overcutting as hillside after hillside was stripped bare.137 Human incursions into increasingly higher elevations led to severe collisions between people and animal species unable to adapt readily to the human presence, including tigers in Korea and wolves, deer, and boars in Japan.138 The use of coal in Japan beginning in the 1700s led to damage of downstream rice paddies and communities by mine effluent. Yet the absence of sheep and goats (animals known for desiccating hillsides), and of environmental

pollution beyond relatively confined areas, meant that on the whole preindustrial Korea and Japan were spared the severe environmental traumas they experienced during subsequent centuries.

Environmental Degradation in Modern Japan Japan's intense industrializing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, part of the Meiji (1868–1912) government's project to “enrich the country, strengthen the military” (fukoku kyhei), resulted in vast degradation of its terrain.139 The first major modern Japanese environmental crisis occurred in the 1880s at the Ashio copper mine on the Watarase River (Tochigi Page 56 →Prefecture, north of Tokyo). Mining operations and pollution there date to the seventeenth century; during the Tokugawa period Ashio copper was a favored export. The mine adopted new technology and rapidly increased operations after the Meiji Restoration (1868), more than doubling production between 1887 and 1891. As a result, water pollution grew increasingly severe, and by the late 1880s nearly all marine life in the Watarase and Tone rivers had died. Massive deforestation to support the mine's expansion led to flooding of the Watarase valley and fields in Gunma, Tochigi, Saitama, and Ibaraki prefectures with poisoned water that devastated crops and harmed people who worked the fields. By 1893 tens of thousands of acres had been deforested by the sulfurous acid gas from the refineries.140 Insects and birds disappeared from the area and infant mortality rose. Floods in 1896 poisoned more than 100,000 acres.141 This destruction was not met silently. The Ashio disaster produced one of Japan's first environmentalists, Tanaka Shz, who fought for years on be-half of those affected by the polluted water and soil.142 It also spurred one of Japan's first modern citizens’ movements. Farmers from affected areas staged mass demonstrations in their own prefectures and in Tokyo; a remarkable array of citizens’ groups supported their efforts, as did academics and the media. After pollution-control measures failed, a large reservoir was built in 1907 to trap fouled floodwaters; the reservoir submerged the heavily polluted village of Yanaka and quickly became a toxic swamp.143 But the Ashio mine was not closed until 1973; cadmium in the soil continued to cause health problems into the 1990s.144 Today, hundreds of volunteers from the Ashio Green Growing Association (Ashio ni Midori o Sodateru Kai), founded by the Japanese novelist Tatematsu Wahei in 1995, meet annually to attempt to replant (regreen) the mountainsides near Ashio, but the soil remains polluted, and it is uncertain whether this effort will be successful.145 The Ashio mine was one of several responsible for Meiji environmental distress. The Besshi mine (Niihama, Ehime Prefecture, Shikoku) also was the site of large-scale pollution, leading to the Niihama refinery pollution incident (1893) and the Shisaka Island refinery pollution incident (1905).146 Pollution from the Kosaka copper mine in Akita Prefecture and the Hitachi mine in Ibaraki Prefecture also noticeably injured surrounding ecosystems. In the 1910s mines in Toyama Prefecture (on the Japan Sea) began significantly polluting both water and land, killing fish and rice and debilitating people with what was called Itai Itai disease (lit. Ouch Ouch disease).147 Nonetheless, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such occurrences were seen as aberrations. And they hardly restrained individuals Page 57 →such as Shiga Shigetaka, a journalist, geographer, and proponent of asserting Japan's cultural distinctiveness in face of pressure from the West. In Nihon fkeiron (Japanese Landscape, 1894), a “rational geographic treatise and a travelogue in the Western style,” Shiga defied conventional means of viewing the Japanese landscape. He was above all taken with Japan's geology and geophysical attributes; he celebrated the wonders of this terrain, hoping to increase national awareness and pride, as well as to demonstrate to Japanese their important position in the new world order.148 Even when pollution incidents became a pattern—after industry replaced agriculture as the most productive sector of the Japanese economy (1905)—the dominant attitude in Japan remained that these incidents simply did not matter, that the natural world was powerful, its ability to rejuvenate was indisputable, and industrial pollution was of little significance.149 This mentalité persisted beyond the deforesting of Japan to meet war-time needs and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, events that demonstrated just how radically and in the latter case how quickly people could transform environments.150 A decade after the war, confronted with pollution and other damage caused by postwar economic growth, Japanese became more aware of the environmental consequences of their behaviors, but most believed the benefits of industrialization still outweighed the costs. Japanese citizens and their government demonstrated considerable apathy toward environmental health until the mid-1960s, when air,

water, and soil pollution grew so severe and so deadly to both people and the ecosystems on which they depended that it could no longer be dismissed or justified.151 The 1960s witnessed three major pollution diseases in Japan: Minamata disease, Niigata Minamata disease, and Yokkaichi asthma, as well as further instances of Itai Itai disease.152 The symptoms of Minamata disease, which affected well over 3,000 people in and around Minamata (a village on the Shiranui Sea in western Kyushu), are well known even outside Japan, thanks in part to W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith's powerful photographic volume Minamata: severe brain damage, neurological degeneration, physical deformities, numbness, slurred and spontaneous speech, involuntary movements, unconsciousness, and death.153 The key dates in the Minamata story also are clear: in 1908 Nihon Carbide built a factory in Minamata; later that year Nihon Carbide merged with Sgi Electric to create Nitchitsu (Nihon Chisso Hiry Kabushiki Kaisha, Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizers, Inc.); in 1932 Chisso began using mercury catalyst in the production of acetaldehyde; in the mid-1950s people in Minamata and surrounding areas began exhibiting symptoms similar to Page 58 →those of acute anterior poliomyelitis; in 1959 a Kumamoto University research group determined mercury to be the probable source of their distress; in 1968 the Japanese government declared Chisso's organic mercury the cause of Minamata disease.154 Minamata patients, their families, and activists continue to struggle for recognition and compensation.155 So too do those suffering from Niigata Minamata disease; confirmed in 1965, this affliction was caused by methyl mercury released into the Agano River (western Japan) by the Shwa Electric Company.156 When Meiji University opened an exhibition on Minamata disease in October 2010, university president Naya Hiromi stated, “Our memory of even a sorrowful incident tends to fade away in time, but we should keep it so we will not repeat such a tragedy. I expect this exhibition to enable us to reflect on past mistakes.”157 Visitors are compelled to think deeply, but how much difference this will make in shaping future conditions remains to be seen. Yokkaichi asthma, the third of Japan's major pollution diseases, was caused by sulfur oxide released by petrochemical processing facilities and refineries in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture (near Nagoya). Large cotton mills moved into Yok-kaichi during the Meiji period, and in the mid-twentieth century the town's lowlands were filled to attract modern industry, including petrochemicals, oil and gasoline refining, and steel production. Residents welcomed these developments, after being promised that Yokkaichi would become a “city of sunlight and greenery,” an urban model for postwar Japan. They were delighted when in 1959 Yokkaichi's complex began twenty-four-hour operation, people exclaiming over their “million dollar night view.” But this proximity was costly. Noise and fumes quickly became unbearable, and residents began contracting a severe form of asthma that failed to respond to conventional treatment. Fish caught in nearby waters became inedible. Even so, additional industrial complexes were built in the area in 1963 and again in 1973. Minamata disease, Niigata Minamata disease, Yokkaichi asthma, and polluted air, water, and soil throughout Japan resulted in a looming sense of environmental crisis. In the late 1960s the Japanese government responded to protests and litigation by Minamata and Yokkaichi victims, nascent environmental groups, and other concerned parties by enacting a series of antipollution measures; in 1970 the Diet passed so many such laws that it was dubbed the “Environmental Pollution Diet.” The next year Japan established an Environment Agency (Kankych, Kankysh [2001–]) and in 1972 the Diet passed the Nature Conservation Law (Shizen Kanky Hozenh). Corporations generally supported such measures as good investments in consumer confidence. Environmental movements flourished through the early 1970s Page 59 →by calling increased attention to ecodegradation.158 But damage continued: in 1975, rice in various parts of Japan was found to have high concentrations of cadmium; in that same year, tests revealed that a startling number of breastfeeding mothers were nourishing their infants with milk contaminated by PCB, DDT, and BHC.159 As long-standing environmental problems eventually abated, new concerns developed: acid rain (brought about in part by pollution in China and both Koreas), poisonous effluents from high-tech semiconductor factories, extensive land reclamation, continued concretizing of waterways, habitat and biodiversity loss, increasing quantities of toxic (including nuclear) waste and the proliferation of waste sites, and persistent water pollution from agricultural chemicals applied to maintain golf courses.160 Some of this damage is caused by U.S. military bases located in Japan. In fact, before the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 Thoku earthquake (Higashi Nihon

Daishinsai; Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster)–which resulted in tsunamis well over 100 feet high and meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex–reinforced Japanese responsibility for many of the nation's environmental woes, some argued that the U.S. military was “Japan's largest polluter.”161 At the same time, Americans living on the Atsugi base in the 1980s and 1990s suffered numerous health problems and contracted fatal diseases from carcinogenic emissions from a nearby Japanese incinerator.162 Facilitating ecodegradation were relaxed environmental controls during the 1980s, especially under Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro.163 During the construction booms of the 1990s and early 2000s hundreds of rural roads were paved and waterways dammed. Japanese environmental groups continued to focus on local issues, forming around a specific problem and disbanding with its resolution, making it difficult to promote a sustained nationwide agenda.164 Yet a renewed rhetoric seeking to mitigate and prevent environmental problems has emerged since the 1990s. The green bandwagon has enthralled citizens, corporations, and government alike.165 Everyone, it seems, “loves nature.” Recycling is taken very seriously; semitransparent garbage bags allow neighbors to keep watch over one another's trash to make certain that regulations are obeyed. Ecopropaganda abounds, and there is no question that green sells.166 Emperor Akihito himself has decried environmental pollution and advocated going green.167 But in a powerful display of ecoambiguity, green discourse often is used in conjunction with behaviors that have questionable impacts on environmental health.168 This discourse also coexists with behaviors that undeniably devastate environments. At the same time that it advocates biodiversity on the international stage, Japan has been criticized Page 60 →repeatedly for blocking attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.169 It additionally is one of the world's worst producers of dioxin contamination.170 Other points of contention have been Japan's reliance on imports to meet its timber needs, particularly its impact on the forests of Southeast Asia, as well as Japanese fishing and whaling practices and the country's seeming apathy toward preserving biodiversity more generally.171 Nevertheless, Japan's low birthrate, decreasing population, and resistance to becoming an immigrant culture (thus virtually guaranteeing a continued decline in population), not to mention its various policies to minimize scarring of landscapes, make it possible that pressures on the archipelago's physical environments will diminish in coming decades.172 Indeed, belief in the need to conserve resources has become particularly acute since the March 2011 triple disaster of the Thoku earth-quake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. In the months that followed this crisis signs announcing setsuden (saving electricity) policies were posted in government buildings, private businesses, and transportation hubs around Japan. These measures were taken seriously, despite the physical discomfort to workers, consumers, and commuters during blistering heatwaves in the summer of 2011. Restrictions on power use were lifted in early September 2011, although many customers plan to continue cutting back on electricity use. More significant have been renewed calls to transform Japan's energy policies by reducing dependence on nuclear power without returning to fossil fuels. Even conservative pundits have joined the antinuclear campaign, which is growing stronger (the day he took office in September 2011, Noda Yoshihiko, Japan's new prime minister, promised to continue Japan's nuclear phase-out) and has changed energy policies across the globe. Many in Japan also have demanded that the nation hold its energy providers, particularly TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) more accountable. As e Kenzabur urged in “History Repeats,” published in The New Yorker two weeks after the earthquake and likely expressing the sentiments of many Japanese: “The dead, watching over us, oblige us to respect [the] ideals [of postwar humanity], and their memory prevents us from minimizing the pernicious nature of nuclear weaponry in the name of political realism. We are opposed. Therein lies the ambiguity of contemporary Japan: it is a pacifist nation sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella. One hopes that the accident at the Fukushima facility will allow the Japanese to reconnect with the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to recognize the danger of nuclear power, and to put an end to the illusion of the efficacy of deterrence that is advocated by nuclear powers.” Page 61 →

Japanese Literature and Environmental Degradation The attention Japanese literature has devoted to nature since the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), Japan's oldest extant text, and the Man’ysh (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, eighth c.), the earliest surviving

collection of Japanese poetry, is often cited as confirmation of Japanese “love of nature.” So consistently have Japanese literature and other art forms discussed, celebrated, and demonstrated sensitivity toward the nonhuman that this “love of nature” is said to have “uniquely distinguished Japan since before the advent of agriculture.”173 It is easy to understand why such beliefs have persisted, how attention to and appreciation of the natural world have been so readily conflated with love, and love with stewardship, despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary. Unlike its European counterparts, most classical Japanese literature that features the nonhuman depicts intimate and harmonious interconnections between people and artistically reconfigured, relatively benign, and thriving environments.174 Classical Japanese literature tends to focus on the mild, kind, and aesthetic aspects of the nonhuman world, rather than striving to give objective, scientific, or “correct” impressions.175 The same is true of premodern Japanese translations of foreign literatures. For instance, while the ant in Aesop's “The Ant and the Grasshopper” shows little mercy on an indolent grasshopper, the ant in the early seventeenth-century Japanese translation of this fable is somewhat charitable.176 The very structure of Japanese poetic language, together with classical literary techniques such as engo (associative language) and kakekotoba (pivot words), accentuates a deep sense of connection between people and nature.177 Landscapes depicted in much classical Japanese literature are more “literary” than “actual”; writers are often inspired less by the physical world than by textual predecessors, which themselves tend to depict a domesticated and restrained natural world.178 To be sure, classical Japanese literature highlights the impermanence of flora and fauna. Yet theirs is a predictable, “natural,” and celebrated impermanence; blossoms flourish and fade, but they do so in time with the seasons (or at least the seasons as constructed in literature), and there is no fear that they will not be replaced.179 Human transformations of landscapes generally occur on the smallest of scales. Premodern Japanese literature mainly depicts people as seeking refuge in and drawing inspiration from nature, not as radically altering their surroundings; changes to environments, including the felling of groves to construct homes and temples, tend to be minimized. It is environments that shape people, at times harming them physically or Page 62 →economically but most often benefiting them artistically and fulfilling them emotionally and spiritually.180 Most scholarship on depictions of nature in classical Japanese literature focuses on these representations.181 Yet an important subset of pre-Meiji Japanese literature—beginning with several poems in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves—alludes to or even speaks explicitly of significant human-induced changes to environments. To be sure, as Edwin Cranston has asserted, “the feeling for the divinity and beauty of the land is one of the most attractive aspects of Man’y [Ten Thousand Leaves] poetry.”182 But some verses in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves that praise Japan's wondrous terrain also appear to be celebrating people's notable reshaping of it. These include the anthology's second poem: “There are crowds of mountains in Yamato, and among these is Heavenly Mount Kagu. When I [Emperor Jomei, 593–641] climb Mount Kagu and look out over the land [kunimi; lit. survey the realm], above the plains the smoke rises and rises; above the seas, the gulls rise and rise. A beautiful land, Dragonfly Island, the land of Yamato.”183 The Japanese text reads: (Yamato ni wa) (murayama aredo) (toriyorou) (ama no Kaguyama) (noboritachi) (kunimi o sureba) (kunihara wa) (keburi tachitatsu) (unahara wa) (kamame tachitatsu)(umashi kuni so) (akizushima) (Yamato no kuni wa). This poem describes a “land looking” (kunimi) ritual, whereby a ruler would climb a mountain and look out over the land to affirm his power and the prosperity of his terrain.184 Here the realm includes both land (kunihara; lit. land plain) and seas (unahara; lit. sea plain); the emperor claims that smoke occupies the airspace above the plains, and that gulls—whose vertical ascent parallels that of the smoke, the verb tachitatsu (to rise) used to describe both—occupy the airspace above the sea. The smoke often is interpreted as manifesting the spirit of the land and the gulls as manifesting the spirit of the sea. This poem celebrates Jomei's authority over both parts of his realm; his power is such that he can see water not actually visible from the diminutive Mount Kagu.185 But what are the implications of smoke, presumably from human activity, rather than an animal or other nonhuman body, embodying the spirit of the land? Emperor Jomei's reign (629–41) coincided with the early decades of Japan's “ancient predation” (600–850), an era of construction and logging on a scale never before seen on the archipelago as its rulers, inspired by the introduction of large-scale architecture from the Asian continent, “dotted the Kinai basin with a plethora of great monasteries, shrines, palaces, and mansions” and eventually felled all the oldgrowth Page 63 →stands in the region.186 Read ecocritically and taking into consideration historical

circumstances, the poem suggests that although gulls and presumably other animals continue to flourish at sea, people have commandeered the land. Moreover, the emperor seems not the least disturbed by these changes; in fact, he celebrates them. This smoky land not only is declared “beautiful” but also is referred to as “Dragonfly Island,” a common appellation for Japan. Flying animals give the land its name, but the fact that they no longer fly above the land is taken as a sign of progress.187 Prominent in premodern Japanese literature are creative works that contrast the ephemerality of human love/life with the endurance of the non-human—in the form of seeming permanence (e.g., that of a mountain) or reliable impermanence (e.g., the successful reproduction and predictable life-cycles of animals and plants). A number of Tokugawaera kanshi (Chinese-language poems by Japanese) echo such sentiments, including works by Hara Skei, Oka Kunsh, and Toriyama Shiken that comment on “autumn grass [that] has buried all footprints [by a grave mound],”188 depict ancient battle-fields that now are places “where birds grieve…the setting sun illuminates green moss…[and] the only thing left to see is the moon moving back and forth in cold trees,”189 and assert that although “flowers and spring are never exhausted, / human and worldly affairs are completely different.”190 Some texts are more ambiguous, suggesting that it is precisely such beliefs that facilitate human shaping of environments. The celebrated Japanese writer Matsuo Bash points to this phenomenon in Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1694) when he intertextualizes the Chinese Tang poet Du Fu's famed “Chun wang” (Spring View). Du Fu's poem, primarily a lament on the sorrows of war, was written on the occasion of An Lushan's 755 rebellion and occupation of the Tang capital Chang’an. It begins: “The kingdom is destroyed, hills and rivers remain; in the city in spring, grasses and trees grow deep.”191 These lines most obviously contrast fragile human life and easily crumbled human constructions with more enduring geological bodies (hills and rivers) and more quickly reproducing bodies of flora (plants and trees). But they also point to human displacement and destruction of vegetation: the mention of plants and trees growing deep in the toppled city is a reminder that before kingdoms can exist to be toppled, vegetation must be felled; the grasses and trees that now grow deep are the descendants of those cleared to build and trimmed to maintain the once magnificent capital.192 Some passages in Narrow Road to the Deep North challenge the paradigm of resilient nonhuman and ephemeral human. Confronted with the ruins of Lord Yasuhira's house at Hiraizumi, Bash cites Du Fu's poem and one by his own companion Sora: “The words ‘The kingdom is destroyed, hills Page 64 →and rivers remain / In the city in spring, grasses grow green’ came to mind…[Sora wrote] ‘Summer grasses are all that remain of the dreams of ancient warriors.’”193 But then, admiring the two adjacent temple halls, Bash is relieved that former generations thought to protect their buildings; so doing, he writes, has prevented cultural products from disintegrating and being replaced by grass. The latter sentiment exchanges respect with apprehension: the grass no longer simply endures longer than people; when left to its own devices, it threatens to disassemble human creations. Yet by speaking of earlier people's preemptive thwarting of this vegetation, the poem also suggests that people can successfully manipulate environments. Other reconfigurations of Du Fu's verse in Narrow Road to the Deep North are even more suggestive. Admiring an enduring eighth-century monument in Ishikawa, Bash notes: “Many places of yore have come down to us in poetry, but mountains crumble, rivers carve out new paths, covering roads and rocks with earth. Trees get old and are replaced.”194 In contrast with Du Fu's lines, Bash's emphasize the instability of nonhuman bodies (mountains, rivers, rocks, trees) as compared with human creations such as poems and monuments. Changes to the environment can occur independent of human behavior, but they also can be anthropogenic: mining and forestry, both well established in Bash's time, can destroy mountains; dams, also prevalent in his age, can force rivers to carve out new paths; and afforestation, which he likely also witnessed, replaces trees. Nature endures, but Bash's ambiguous discourse suggests that its shape might be more determined by human behaviors than his literary predecessors acknowledged.195 More deliberately contradictory are texts such as Yoshida Kenk's Tsur-ezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1332), which decries the abuse of most animals but condones that of horses and oxen: Domestic animals include the horse and the ox. It's a shame that we have to bind and hurt them, but there's nothing else we can do, since they're invaluable to us…When animals that run are confined to

pens or fastened with chains, when birds that fly have their wings clipped or are caged, their longing for the clouds and their sadness at being away from the hills and fields knows no end. How can those capable of imagining how terrible they would feel under these conditions enjoy keeping such animals as pets? A person who enjoys hurting living beings is just like Emperor Jie [of Xia] and Emperor Zhou [of Shang].196

Kenk strongly advocates the humane treatment, indeed freedom of nearly all animals. Yet instead of suggesting how people might improve their interactions Page 65 →with horses and oxen, he declares that mistreating these species is unavoidable. Over the centuries premodern Japanese literature articulated a broad range of human interactions with environments. Although never entirely absent from the corpus, explicit references to human-induced ecological degradation began to appear more frequently in early twentieth-century creative works and then regularly beginning in the 1970s. To be sure, the Meiji “discovery of landscape” (fkei no hakken) manifested in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese realism and conceptualized by the Japanese literary critic Karatani Kjin was little concerned with unearthing damage to environments; realism “[brought] into existence landscapes which, although they had always been there, had never been seen,” but these generally were not the landscapes of pollution or other environmental distress.197 Although Meiji (1868–1912), Taish (1912–26), and early Shwa (1926–89) literatures often celebrated nature, depicted it as the means to salvation, ex-pounded on its curiosities, and featured characters deeply integrated within it, some early twentieth-century creative works depict a more intimidating landscape. Both Nagatsuka Takashi's novel Tsuchi (The Earth, 1910) and Arishima Takeo's novella Kain no matsuei (Descendants of Cain, 1917) dramatize the struggles of those working the land.198 In Arishima's text nature is as much the tenant farmer's adversary as are his neighbors and landlord. As the narrator declares in the opening pages: “The relentless wind raged across mountains and fields. The night flowed eastward like a great river of lacquer…The only thing revived there was wild, fierce, and overpowering nature [arakureta ooki na shizen dake ga soko ni yomigaetta].”199 Here winter is bitter cold, spring rains drown crops, summer brings with it a blitz of insects, and autumn rains rot the harvest. Other creative works, including Sat Haruo's novella Den’en no yutsu (Rural Melancholy, 1917), depict an oppressive nonhuman, one where plants defy the attempts of gardeners to control their growth, battle one another for resources, and suffocate people and their constructions: The untended garden grew thick in midsummer. All the trees stretched their roots into the ground as deeply as they could to draw power from the soil. The trees wore leaves on every side to soak up their fill of sunlight…To bathe in as much sunlight as possible, to grow larger, every tree thrust out its branches…The lush branches and leaves of the many different types of vegetation, the entire garden, were just like the melancholy of wild hair hanging down from a madman's leaden forehead. The invisible weight of Page 66 →the vegetation pushed on the narrow garden from above and made one feel as though the building in the middle were surrounded and squashed by its perimeter.200 Rural Melancholy, like many of its contemporaries, depicts environments as shaping, not as shaped by, people. On the other hand, the widespread, serious, and rapid damage Meiji Japan's industrialization inflicted on the nation's landscapes was not completely overlooked by Japanese literary artists. Among the most famous examples of early twentieth-century environmentally conscious writings are Miyazawa Kenji's well-informed portraits of diverse ecologies. His poetry, short stories, and children's literature celebrate flora, fauna, and intimate relationships between people and nature, but they also evoke nostalgia for a more innocent past that suggests these relationships are now threatened if not in some cases already destroyed.201 Stories such as “Chmon no i ryriten” (The Restaurant of Many Orders, 1924) disparage particular human attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis environments, including arrogance and sport hunting. This text features two hunters who enjoy shooting animals just to watch them suffer. Wandering deep into a forest, they become disoriented, and their dogs suddenly perish. They then have a horrifying hallucination: they enter a restaurant of “many orders” believing they will have their choice of dishes to select but instead discover that they are the ones being ordered and will soon be served to wild

animals for dinner. Awakening from their illusion just as they are about to be eaten, the men return safely home but with faces damaged beyond repair. Likewise criticizing Japanese hunting practices are texts such as Oguma Hideo's “Tobu Sori” (Flying Sled, 1935), which paradoxically depict the reverent Ainu as taking more nonhuman lives than disrespectful urban Japanese. Speaking of specific ecological tragedies were such texts as Shiga Naoya's Aru otoko sono ane no shi (The Death of a Certain Man's Sister, 1920), which mentions the Ashio copper mine incident. Shiga's novella centers on the contentious relationship between a boy and his father; near the conclusion the narrator notes that the most serious argument between the two arose when the boy (then a middle-school student) attended a rally protesting the damage to people and the environment caused by effluent from the Ashio copper mine and announced he was going to tour the affected sites. He was forbidden to do so by his father because his grandfather once had been titular owner of the mine; the grandfather overhears the argument between father and son but remains silent, the narrator speculating that he greatly regrets having instigated such suffering. The Death of a Certain Man's Sister does Page 67 →not speak at length about the poisoning of the Watarase River, but it does give a glimpse into the psychologies of those involved in its aftermath: youthful protestors, elderly accomplices, and a middle generation fearful of attempting to reconcile the two.202 Visiting (semi)colonial East Asians also commented on the toxicity of some of Japan's cityscapes. For instance, in his posthumous essay “Tonggyng” (Tokyo, 1939) the colonial Korean writer Yi Sang remarked, “My first impression of Tokyo was, ‘This city reeks of gasoline!’…The citizens of Tokyo smell like cars.”203 Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, he blames his inability to appreciate Tokyo's sights and smells on his own weak lungs and morality, the latter of which he claims “exudes a sour nineteenth-century odor.” Depicting much about Tokyo as an illusion, Yi Sang shreds the facades of Japanese modernity: “These days, the seven-story Mitsukoshi, Matsuzakaya, Itya, Shirokiya, and Matsuya [all major department stores] don't sleep at night. However, we can't go inside. Why? The interiors are one story, not [as their facades suggest] seven stories.”204 The pollution outside, on the other hand, is all too real. The 1940s yielded somewhat increased literary attention to ecological degradation.205 In Tsugaru (1944) the literary leader Dazai Osamu addressed environmental problems including deforestation. Although it focuses primarily on human suffering, literature of the atomic bomb from its inception in 1945 has decried destruction of the nonhuman and called attention to many of nature's ambiguities, particularly how quickly it recovers from injury.206 Other creative work such as Hayashi Fumiko's Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1951) exposes rampant and needless Japanese wartime deforestation in Southeast Asia. This text depicts Tomioka, an employee of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry stationed in French Indochina, writing in his memoirs that he and his men “were forced by the army to fell trees recklessly and violently [kanari ranb na ranbatsu mo yatta].” Many of the trees they chop remain close to where they fall, the narrator noting: “The kacha pines must be fifty or sixty years old, but the Japanese were chopping them down randomly, without hesitation, reporting only numbers to the army. The numbers were laughing…[The slain trees remained on the riverbanks.] Only the numbers moved, from desk to desk.”207 Hayashi's novel does not condemn this sportlike destruction, but it does question its appropriateness. On the other hand, the chief of the Forestry Bureau tells Tomioka that the slash-and-burn agriculture of the local indigenous peoples has radically changed conditions in the primeval forest, suggesting that the Japanese are not the only ones to have altered this region's ecosystems.208 Human manipulation of forests, and of the planet more generally, is also addressed in Kawabata Page 68 →Yasunari's novel Koto (Ancient Capital, 1962) where Naeko alerts her long-lost sister Chieko that the trees Chieko has been admiring in fact are “cryptomeria made by people.” She continues: These are about forty years old. They’ll be cut and made into pillars and similar things. If left to themselves, they would likely grow for a thousand years, becoming thick and tall…I like primeval forests best. In this village it's like we're making cut flowers…Were there no people in the world, there would be nothing like Kyoto either. It would be natural forests and weeds. The land would belong to the deer and wild boar, would it not? Why are people in this world? It's frightening, people.209

The dangers of postwar urbanization and industrialization to ecosystems of all kinds were readily apparent to people across Japan. Atomic bomb literature, Floating Clouds, Ancient Capital, and similar creative texts from the 1940s to early 1960s, and even more significantly the 1964 Japanese-language translation of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Japanese society's growing environmental consciousness, cleared the track for the late-1960s and 1970s boom in literary texts portraying devastated environments.210 Pollution was the principal concern, writers such as Mishima Yukio in Tennin gosui (Decay of the Angel, 1970), for instance, depicting characters traveling to sites celebrated in classical literature for their natural beauty only to find them littered with the debris of contemporary life, including Coke bottles, food cans, and plastic bags. Writers and activists, focusing on past and present crises alike, drew inspiration from early twentieth-century predecessors such as Arahata Kanson's Yanakamura metsubshi (History of the Collapse of Yanaka Village, 1902) on the Ashio mine, reprinted in 1970; in 1973 Ishimure Michiko revealed that Minamata residents had eagerly read Arahata's book in the early stages of their struggle against the Chisso Corporation.211 Texts such as Nitta Jir's Aru machi no takai entotsu (The Tall Smokestack of a Certain Town, 1968), which takes place between 1903 and 1915 and concerns the Hitachi mine pollution case, and Kimoto Shji's novel Shisakajima (Shisaka Island, 1972), which deals with the hard-ships encountered by farmers on Shisaka Island when Besshi mine began smelting operations there at the turn of the twentieth century, reminded readers of the deep historical roots of Japan's environmental problems.212 The best-known and most encompassing environmentally oriented creative works from the late 1960s and 1970s address contemporary events— Ishimure's Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land (1969) and Ariyoshi Sawako's Page 69 →Fukug osen (Compound Pollution, 1975). A creative writer, activist, and native of Minamata, Ishimure has worked for decades to educate people the world over about Minamata disease and to compel Japanese authorities to compensate more adequately Minamata disease patients and their families.213 Sea of Suffering, her most famous literary work, is the first part of her trilogy on Minamata and one of her many writings on this tragedy.214 The narrator of this novel includes accounts on her own interactions with Minamata patients and experiences fighting corporate and government bureaucracies that refuse to acknowledge their suffering. She also incorporates moving stories of Minamata patients in their own voices and those of their families and friends. In addition, she contextualizes the experiences of the Minamata villagers, discussing pollution incidents elsewhere in Japan and the world. Whereas Sea of Suffering focuses largely on the etiologies and realities of Minamata disease, Compound Pollution addresses more generally pollution brought about by drastic increases in Japanese consumerism. This novel was serialized in the Asahi shinbun from October 1974 to June 1975. A collection of newspaper columns divided into fifteen sections, it interweaves fact and fiction in a variety of genres to highlight the dangers of air and water pollution, as well as food contaminated with additives and agricultural chemicals. The book emphasizes that although pollution often is perceived as occurring in isolated bursts and affecting only small groups of people, it in fact threatens everyone; contaminated air, water, and soil jeopardize the health of rich and poor, urban and rural, young and old. Presuming its audience, especially female consumers, knows little about pollutants, the text introduces a variety of chemical substances, explaining the politics behind their use, how they are employed in Japan and around the world, and the threats each poses to people and environments. By revealing the connections between agriculture and pollution, as well as war and pollution, the narrator stresses the responsibilities of the consumer; she refuses to allow her readers to perceive themselves solely as victims and encourages them to make ethical choices. She likens herself to Rachel Carson, insisting that she is not promoting a ban on all chemicals but instead recommending more careful vetting before use. Not surprisingly, both Sea of Suffering and Compound Pollution attracted considerable attention and were catalysts for Japanese environmental movements and reforms. The endurance of Ishimure's work is particularly noteworthy: Sea of Suffering and the final two parts of her Minamata trilogy are the only Japanese novels included in the Japanese publisher Kawade Shob Shinsha's current Sekai bungaku zensh (Complete Collection of World Literature, 2007–); the trilogy is advertised as “a masterpiece representing postwar Japanese literature” that “deeply questions what it means to be human.”215 Page 70 → Most of Japan's early environmentally conscious literature concerns pollution, but in the 1970s Japanese published several significant creative texts focusing on conservation. In addition to Tanikawa Shuntar's poem “Sora ni kotori

shisontachi (Descendants of the Mist, 1970) and Watanabe Jun’ichi's Mine no kioku (Memories of Mountain Peaks, 1976).216 Nitta's novel, set in the 1960s, concerns the potential ecological and cultural consequences of extending the Venus Line toll road through the Kirigamine mountains (Nagano Prefecture). Written to assist the local opposition movement, Descendants of the Mist describes the ecosystems of the region, exposes the aims of the developers, and urges people to work together to forestall this and similar projects.217 Watanabe's novel Memories of Mountain Peaks concerns the planned construction of a road through Hokkaido's Daisetsuzan National Park. The novel's protagonist is a civil engineer who must determine the route for the highway with the least potential effect on the park's ecosystems. His hopes to preserve a primeval forest are thwarted when an overloaded helicopter carrying supplies crashes and catches fire, charring the woodland. Unlike many of its contemporaries, Memories of Mountain Peaks describes a potential rather than an actual incident.218 The novel warns its readers about the uncertain future of landscapes they take for granted. Similarly focusing on imagined scenarios is Japan's environmental science fiction. Abé Kb's Daiyon kanpyki (Inter Ice Age 4, 1959), declared by some to be Japan's first science fiction novel, depicts a world in which climate change and genetic engineering have radically transformed human society; rising sea levels have buried continents and people have been replaced by a new species created from aborted human fetuses.219 Also note-worthy are texts such as “Tatazumu hito” (Standing Person, 1974) by Tsutsui Yasutaka, one of Japan's most prominent science fiction writers. Hoshi Shin’ichi, midcentury Japan's short-short story writer par excellence, made even larger contributions to environmental science fiction, as did Komatsu Saky, who was haunted by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Komatsu's Nippon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, 1973), which features the physical collapse of Japan, was a best-seller; the novel and its manga adaptation were published simultaneously, and a film version was released the following year.220 Even more significant from an environmental perspective are two stories from Komatsu's 1973 collection Adamu no sue (The Descendants of Adam): “Aozora” (Blue Sky) and “Seijaku no tsro” (Silent Corridor). “Blue Sky” features a couple who reject a pristine mountain environment in favor of a city so polluted that people must wear filters in their throats to prevent Page 71 →their bodies from being overwhelmed with sand and soot. In contrast, “Silent Corridor”—which takes place in 1990s Tokyo—depicts a couple having difficulty conceiving; the text discusses a range of environmental problems likely responsible for their infertility. “Silent Corridor” is advertised as a “fictionalization” of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; the story is prefaced by a quotation from the Japanese translation of Carson, and several episodes echo passages in Carson's book.221 Literary attention to environmental problems continued during the 1980s and 1990s. While writers such as Masuda Mizuko and Murakami Haruki for the most part addressed human abuse of environments relatively tangentially, creative works from this era such as Kayano Shigeru's Kamuiyukara to mukashibanashi (Yukar, The Ainu Epic and Folktales, 1988) depict Ainu life in Hokkaido and stress the importance of preserving that island's ecosystems; Kayano, one of the last native speakers of the Ainu language, protested the damming of rivers in northern Hokkaido.222 Published two years later, Amano Reiko's Mansa to Nagaragawa: “Saigo no kawa” ni ikita otoko (Mansa and the Nagara River: A Man Who Lived on the “Last River,” 1990) deplores dam construction on the Nagara River, highlighting the significance of protecting local landscapes and the lifestyles of the region's fishers; Amano has published extensively on dams and rivers and is a leading opponent of dam construction on the Nagara River.223 Many novels by the environmental activist Tatematsu Wahei from these decades likewise address ecodegradation in Japan and beyond, including Enrai (Distant Thunder, 1980), Nettai urin (Tropical Rain Forest, 1983), and Umi no kanata no eien (Eternity across the Sea, 1989).224 And the horrors of Minamata disease continued to be revealed not only in new editions of Ishimure's work but also in such contemporary texts as Ogata Masato and iwa Keib's Tokoyo no fune o kogite: Minamataby shishi (Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World: An Unauthorized History of Minamata Disease, 1996) and its English-language adaptation Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001). Twenty-first-century best-selling Japanese writers regularly express environmental concerns in their work, including the celebrated feminist poet It Hiromi in Kawara arekusa (Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 2005) and popular novelist Taguchi Randy in Konsento (Outlet, 2000), Hikari no ame furu shima Yakushima (Island Where Shining Rain Falls: Yakushima, 2001), Tensei (Transmigration, 2001), Kodama (Echo, 2003), and Fujisan (Mount Fuji, 2004).225 While Outlet references global warming, Mount Fuji the garbage scarring this mountain, and Echo the deforestation of ancient groves, Yakushima addresses how or whether to write about breathtaking landscapes;

so doing likely will increase both demands to preserve them and pressures for tourist travel. Indeed, Page 72 →the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism runs ecotours to Yakushima which ultimately harm local ecosystems.226 Also noteworthy is the Okinawan writer Ikegami Eiichi's science fiction novel Shangurira (Shangri-La, 2005) and its recent manga and television adaptations, which feature a tropical twentyfirst-century Tokyo, transformed by global warming.227 The March 2011 Thoku catastrophe is likely to have a sustained impact on Japanese literary production. Japan's best-known authors–e Kenzabur and Murakami Haruki–have already published on the quake and its aftermath, and numerous figures, from popular writers such as Yoshimoto Banana to authors unknown outside of Japan, have written poems and short stories grappling with the triple tragedy of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns. As the interest in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and references to environmental problems outside Japan in Japanese creative work suggest, postwar Japanese writers have avidly read environmentally oriented literature from around the world, the United States in particular.228 Japanese and Western writers and artists have long looked to one another's work for inspiration, particularly for understandings and depictions of nonhuman phenomena.229 Their interpersonal connections are also notable. Strongest have been the ties between the poets and environmental activists Sakaki Nanao and Gary Snyder. Sakaki and Snyder spent significant time living, hiking, and mountain climbing in each other's countries, as well as in many other sites around the world.230 Sakaki included Snyder and other foreigners in Buzoku (The Tribe), a countercultural group that he and the environmental writer Yamao Sansei led in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s.231 He also translated Snyder's verse, including the collection Turtle Island (1984), into Japanese. Snyder's foreword to a volume of Sakaki's work in English translation reveals his enormous admiration for his Japanese counterpart. Hagiographically describing Sakaki's ethos, Snyder exclaims: Nanao Sakaki's poems and presence are known from Tokyo to Amsterdam, New York to London, Maine to San Francisco. He also lives and works—completely at home—in the mountains back of Taos, in the deserts of the lower Rio Grande, in pine forests of the Sierra Nevada, the subtropical islands of the Ryukyu archipelago, the chilly spruce woods of Hokkaido, the narrow valleys of Kyoto, and the ten thousand bars maze of Shinjuku, Tokyo. He is one of the first truly cosmopolitan poets to emerge from Japan, but the sources of his thought and inspiration are older than east and west. And newer.232 Page 73 → For decades the two poets regularly wrote about each other and intertextualized each other's literary output in their own creative work.233 Dialogues among Japanese writers and scholars and their counterparts elsewhere in East Asia have likewise taken a more environmental turn, although, with several notable exceptions, as of the first decade of the twenty-first century interactions among East Asian ecocritical scholars of different nationalities are more common than those among ecologically oriented creative writers.234 Also showing no sign of diminishing are the contributions of Japanese popular culture to discourse on the environment in Japan and around the world. Japanese film has played a vital role, from documentaries such as director Sat Makoto's Agano ni ikiru (Living on the Agano, 1992) and its sequel Agano no kioku (Memories of Agano, 2004), both of which dramatize the impact of Minamata disease on a mountain community in Niigata, to the Oscar-winning twelve-minute “Tsumiki no ie” (The House of Small Cubes, 2008), which was directed by Kat Kunio and depicts an old man attempting to prevent rising water caused by global warming from flooding his house.235 Environmental degradation occupies an even larger position in Japanese manga and anime. One example is the anime metaseries Gandamu (Gundam, 1979–), which features overpopulation and destruction of ecosystems as causing massive armed conflict and migration to outer space; Gundam began as a television series and now includes a plethora of films, manga, novels, and video games. Just as noteworthy is celebrated director Miyazaki Hayao's postapocalyptic Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Windy Valley, 1982–94). This anime depicts human societies as declining sharply after a millennium of plundering the earth's riches, polluting its air, and changing its life-forms; during the Seven Days of Fire they destroyed their cities and lost their advanced technology. Nausicaä is set a millennium after the Seven Days of Fire, but the world remains covered

by the “Sea of Corruption”; in this environment people are capable of eking out only the most meager of existences.236 Even more popular has been Miyazaki's Mononokehime (Princess Mononoke, 1997), Japan's highest-grossing film of all time, animated or otherwise. Set in the fourteenth century, Princess Mononoke opens with a wild boar felling a primeval forest; the boar has been maddened by an iron ball lodged in its body. The remainder of the film features struggles between people and the beasts and spirits of a magical forest. Decapitating the leader of the forest, people set off a chain of events that results in its destruction, but in the end harmony between humans and environments is restored. Miyazaki's supernaturalization of the “natural” reconfigures conventional Japanese views of the nonhuman, depicting landscapes such as the forest as abjected Page 74 →spaces that ultimately enact revenge.237 This animated film, in the words of Susan Napier, is “a wake-up call to human beings in a time of environmental and spiritual crisis that attempts to provoke its audience into realizing how much they have already lost and how much more they stand to lose.”238 With several notable exceptions, Japanese films have sounded more strident wake-up calls than Japanese literary works, but for decades the latter have been actively negotiating the ambiguities surrounding environmental degradation.

Environmental Degradation in Modern Korea Korea at the turn of the twentieth century experienced industrialization, rapid population growth, and steady urbanization as well as new agronomic and fishery technologies and intense forest harvesting. Although these changes improved the lives of many, they led also to substantial environmental problems, particularly pollution and biohabitat loss. Practices harmful to environments were instigated or intensified by the Japanese colonial government from 1910 to 1945. Japanese leaders, frequently relying on local collaborators, subjected Korea to numerous policies that exploited both its people and its ecosystems. The colonizers increased agricultural production and rapidly became dependent on Korean crops to feed people in the metropole. In the 1930s Japan began building heavy industries in Korea to advance its military agenda. The Japanese, who depended on Korean labor, also constructed an extensive network of roads and railways; mined the colony's gold, silver, iron, and coal; depleted its fisheries; dammed its rivers; and felled its forests so extensively that by the 1940s only the remotest regions still enjoyed tree cover.239 The Korean War (1950–53), which took the lives of nearly three million Koreans, devastated the peninsula's population and flattened its industries and cities.240 Park Chung Hee's coup d’état in 1961 ushered in decades of unprecedented industrial and urban growth in South Korea.241 The ecological impact on the Korean peninsula initially was not as substantial as might have been expected, since Koreans relied increasingly on imported metals, fossil fuels, wood products, and foodstuffs.242 But by the 1970s ecodegradation at home became impossible to ignore, and South Koreans organized several small groups to heighten environmental consciousness.243 Even so, pollution generally was believed to be an inevitable price of economic growth, Park Chung Hee adamantly declaring in 1962, “Dark smoke rising from factories is symbolic of our nation's growth and prosperity.”244 The powerful desire for development, combined with the authoritarianism of Korea's military regime, Page 75 →meant that few dared protest the nation's environmental policies and practices. It was only in the 1980s, under Chun Doo Hwan, that South Korea developed its first comprehensive environmental program.245 Citizens also formed a number of green organizations during the 1980s that called attention to the high human and nonhuman costs of pollution, particularly Onsan disease, an illness similar to Japan's Itai Itai disease that is caused by heavymetal contamination.246 During the 1980s South Korea's dependence on nuclear power also came under heightened scrutiny, and the nation's first antinuclear movement was founded in 1987. Surveys from this period indicate that a large majority of South Koreans believed the environmental quality of their nation a serious problem, suggesting strong public support for efforts to curb ecodegradation.247 Yet despite some improvements, most notably for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, overall conditions continued to decline.248 The early 1990s brought a number of significant environmental crises and protests: plans to build a nuclear waste storage facility on Anmyn Island (western Korea) met with considerable resistance, and a chemical spill in the Naktong River near Taegu (southeast Korea) endangered the lives of 1.5 million South Koreans and captured nationwide attention. Although in both cases the physical scope of the (anticipated) damage was relatively small, the incidents terrified the Korean population. Many residents feared that they might be the next to be directly affected by nuclear and other forms of pollution. On the other hand, although both environmental movements and

the government's alleged commitment to solving ecological problems boomed in the 1990s, there was little improvement in the environment itself. As Su-Hoon Lee notes, “In 1996 alone, major incidents related to pollution or environmental deterioration included the illegal release of water from the contaminated Siwha Lake, incidents of pollution illness reported in the Yeo-cheon petrochemical industrial complex, dead fish in major rivers, and summertime ozone-related smog in Seoul.”249 These trends continued into the twenty-first century: pollution, destruction of habitat, and decreasing biodiversity remain significant problems.250 As mayor of Seoul between 2002 and 2006, Lee Myung Bak instigated a number of projects to green the city.251 Such initiatives beautified sections of its surface, but the air remained polluted. Between September 2008 and December 2009, Lee Myung Bak (then South Korea's president) allocated 80 percent of Korea's total fiscal stimulus spending to green stimulus spending, the highest percentage in the world.252 In 2009 he announced a Green New Deal for the country, promising to improve energy conservation, carbon reduction, recycling, and flood prevention, as well as create new jobs. The backbone of this ecoambiguous policy is Page 76 →the Four Rivers Restoration Project (4RRP), which aims to control flooding and provide South Koreans with more and better water, but this program has been criticized by hundreds of environmental and civic groups as likely to harm water quality, endanger species, and reduce biodiversity.253 Even so, the extent to which environmental groups can truly mitigate the degradation threatened by the 4RRP remains to be seen. Despite high awareness and vigorous environmental activism since the 1980s, South Koreans, like many peoples around the world, seem to care more about “private space” than “shared space” (i.e., environments) and thus are not willing to modify their behaviors in ways that might preserve the latter.254 Exacerbating conditions are yellow dust and industrial pollution blown in from China, which not only contaminate South Korea's air but also increase acid rain. North Korea is even more at the mercy of Chinese pollution, but many of its environmental problems—severe industrial pollution; deforestation, flooding, and soil erosion; water pollution, including from nitrates in the very high concentrations of fertilizers and pesticides such as DDT used in the country; and disposal of nuclear and other toxic waste—have sources closer to home.255 Frustrating remediation efforts are the nation's geography, legacies of colonialism and war, heavy industrialization, technological gaps in environment management and pollution control, and an institutional frame-work that militates against two necessary factors for environmental management: decentralized responsibility and lateral coordination. North Korea passed its basic Environmental Protection Law in 1986; this law stipulates that all industries are to adhere to environmental standards, claims all citizens have environmental rights, and places the burden of liability on polluters. And at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 North Korea signed major international agreements on biodiversity, climate change, and forestry. But changing actual interactions with the natural world has been a tremendous challenge. Not surprisingly, in the last two decades most of the nation's environmental problems, deforestation in particular, have only become more severe. The Korean peninsula's most ecoambiguous phenomenon is its demilitarized zone (DMZ), a space four kilometers wide and nearly 250 kilometers long near the 38th parallel, at once the world's most heavily militarized border and an accidental, eccentric wildlife preserve.256 Human settlements and farmlands in the region date back an estimated five millennia, but having been almost entirely free from human habitation since 1953, the zone now is home to more than one thousand plant species and hundreds of animal species, many of which are elsewhere endangered. The DMZ has been heralded as a “global treasure house of ecosystems.”257 And experts have claimed that collaborative efforts to transform the DMZ into a UNESCO World Heritage Page 77 →Site are likely to improve relationships among the two Koreas and the other Six-Party states.258 At the same time, not only is the DMZ full of deserted villages and tens of thousands of unburied human corpses, it also remains a site of continued army operations.259 In addition to defoliants and forest fires set for site clearing, land mines are a significant problem. As the celebrated Korean fiction writer Kim Yngha once noted, “I remember waking at night hearing deer exploding [because of the land mines]…I would hear the sound of the explosion and would think of the deer lying there dying.”260 Much of the recent idealization of the DMZ as ecological paradise is illusory.

Korean Literature and Environmental Degradation Engaging with interactions between people and nature has always been an important part of Korean literary production; since its outset, Korean literature has incorporated numerous references to the nonhuman and often

has made it the focus.261 Analogies between people and trees date from ancient Korea, with the pine, cypress, and several other species often standing in for the ruling dynasty. As Peter Lee has noted, trees also serve as a “symbol of life for individual, generation, and race…Later the symbolism of the tree was tinged by certain Confucian and Daoist virtues such as endurance, fidelity, integrity, order, continuity, freedom, fulfillment, and destiny.”262 Likewise, much early Korean literature compares individuals’ circumstances with those of the natural world or otherwise relates human and nonhuman emotion and experience. For instance, “Hwangjo ka” (Song of the Yellow Birds), attributed by some to Kogury's (37 B.C.E.–668 C.E.) Emperor Yuri, written in literary Chinese, and alleged to be Korea's earliest literary composition, reads: “Fluttering yellow birds, / Males and females having fun together, / Think of me all alone! / With whom will I return?”263 Recently abandoned by one of his lovers, the poem's speaker envies the birds their seemingly effortless companionship. He also looks to the animals for sympathy. Other early Korean literature describes landscapes, usually luscious, that are seemingly devoid of people; or it speaks of people, often recluses or others eager to escape society, immersing themselves in such landscapes.264 Still more writings highlight the relative permanence of nonhuman phenomena. The famed cartographer and poet Kwn Kn writes in “Sangdae pylgok” (Song of the Censor, 1419) that “south of Mount Hwa, north of the Han River, for a thousand years a famous scenic spot /…clear winds have blown here for tens of thousands of years.”265 In contrast, a small but important part of early Korean literature addresses Page 78 →harm to environments. Some works criticize human abuse of the natural world, while others such as the prolific scholar-official Yi Kyubo's poem “Tongmyng Wang p’yn” (Book of Emperor Tongmyng [r. 37–19 B.C.E.], 1193) glorify it. “Book of Emperor Tongmyng” is based on the foundation myth of the Kogury kingdom. Elaborating on Chinese and Korean histories, it interweaves depictions of nonhuman fecundity with those of human abuse of environments. At times, the poem simply alludes to the latter. It claims that Emperor Tongmyng chose as the site of his capital a space “surrounded by rivers and thickly wooded hills”266 and that when it came time for the capital to be constructed: The crests of the ridges were concealed, and thousands of people could be heard breaking trees. The king said, “Heaven is building me a fortress over there.” Suddenly the mist scattered and a towering royal palace stood there.267 The poem does not speak explicitly of ravished hillsides, but with enough wood felled to satisfy thousands of carpenters, the landscape has been significantly altered. At times Yi Kyubo's poem addresses human abuse of animals more directly. Before he became emperor, Tongmy ng, then known as Chumong, went looking for a trusty stallion. Identifying the strongest horse in the king's herd, he and his mother “stuck a needle in its tongue / that pained it so it couldn't eat; / [and] in a day or so it wasted away [ssrigo ap’a mkji mothae, / mych’il man e yawis].”268 Believing the horse on the verge of death, the king gives it to Chumong, who feeds it and restores its strength. Later in the poem, after anointing himself Emperor Tongmyng and hoping to vanquish his rival Songyang, Chumong/Tongmyng “caught a tall snow-white deer / and strung it up by its hind feet /…[the deer] was in such distress / its moans were heard in heaven.”269 These cries bring about Tongmyng's victory: the rains fall, Songyang submits, and Tongmyng's new fortress is built. Flora and fauna are depicted as expendable and their suffering and deaths even celebrated in the name of human glory.270 References to environmental harm appear more regularly in Korean literature written after the nineteenth century.

Scholarship on twentieth-century Korean literature has called attention to how it articulates the suffering of the Korean people: despair, poverty, illness, forced labor/conscription, imprisonment, Page 79 →rape, torture, and death as a result of Japanese colonization (1910– 45); the division of the peninsula into North and South Korea in 1945 and the 1953 armistice that permanently separated families and resulted in a significant American military presence in the South to this day; the Korean War; and South Korea's postwar military dictatorships and corrupt administrations. Without question, human suffering resulting from human behavior— whether Japanese, American, or Korean—is a central part of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Korean literature. But violence by people against people is not the only trauma exposed by these writings. A number of creative works also reveal anthropogenic damage of the nonhuman. Injuries take many forms, including polluted and at times irradiated air, water, and soil, deforestation, and depopulation or even species extinction. Some creative texts—including Yi T’aejun's “T’okki iyagi” (Rabbit Story, 1941)—point to the moral dilemmas of killing animals for income. “Rabbit Story” depicts an impoverished writer whose wife, hoping to ease their financial woes, raises rabbits for their meat.271 Although the protagonist believes that he as a man is duty-bound to kill the animals, he finds it impossible to do so; the story concludes with his desperate wife appearing before him with shaking, bloody hands. Colonial-period Korean writers including Yi Sang speak of landscapes damaged on a broader scale in such texts as “Ach’im” (Morning, 1936), a prose poem that describes the injurious effects of air pollution. Early twentieth-century Japanese writers with experience in Korea also wrote of damage to Korea's environments. Yuasa Katsue's novella Kan’nani (1934) depicts storms, not human behaviors, as uprooting nature and features a Japanese character who declares the Korean skies more beautiful and the rainbows more intense than anything back home. On the other hand, this novella describes rivers after the storms as littered with personal belongings, furniture, domesticated animals, and even toppled houses, because people have not firmly secured their built environment.272 To be sure, many postwar South Korean writers published creative work celebrating Korea's landscapes or depicting other relatively conventional interactions between people and environments. These include Hwang Tonggyu, whose poetry often idealizes human/nonhuman relationships; Pak Tujin, whose texts speak extensively of the power of nature as a place of transcendence and salvation of humanity; and Sin Skchng, who wrote such paeans to the landscape as “San san san” (Mountains, Mountains, Mountains, 1953), which reads simply: “Shot up / on the earth / the mountains are beautiful // Mountains are beautiful / because they stay so high // Mountains are more beautiful because innocent animals and flowers prettier than Helen / Page 80 →live there together // All the time / I too, trying to become a mountain / stretch my neck like a giraffe / and gaze into the distance / mountains / mountains / mountains.273 Yet only a month after writing “Mountains,” Sin Skchng composed “Chayn kwa Rousseau” (Nature and Rousseau, 1953). Beginning with “Would you say ‘Return to nature’? / Where is beautiful nature that makes you say so?” (Chayn ro toragaraguyo? / armdaun chayn i di ittki e / malssm imnikka?) this poem claims there is no “nature” to which to return, because all the trees have been cut from the hillsides and all the birds have vanished.274 The number of creative texts published in South Korea mentioning if not decrying human abuse of environments sharply increased in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Korean literature turned more generally to exposing the consequences of rapid industrialization. One of the most celebrated works of this type is Kim Kwangsp's “S ngbukdong pidulgi” (The Pigeons of Sngbukdong, 1968). The poem features a pigeon that once enjoyed friendly relationships with its human neighbors but now has been driven from its home by new construction. It has no place to perch and its body is constantly being shaken by explosions from a nearby quarry. As a result, it has lost its ties to both people and the land; its heart, once flooded with love and peace, now is literally cracked (kasm e km i katta).275 The poem initially depicts the bird as attempting to comfort the people of Sngbukdong, despite the fact that it has been dislocated. But the explosions prove too much even for short visits, and it eventually must abandon this space. Many texts on urbanization highlight the absence of animals in cityscapes, even creatures such as pigeons that can flourish on human scraps. As the Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri notes in “The Water's Footfall” (1964): “The town was visible: / The growing geometry of cement, iron and stone / The pigeon-free rooftops of hundreds of buses.”276 While Kim Kwangsp's poems are among the first in Korea to speak explicitly of damage caused by postwar urbanization and industrialization, creative work by writers such as Yu Hynjong and Mun Sunt’ae paved the way

Hometown, 1977) Mun Sunt’ae exposes the plight of farmers whose lives are radically altered when a new dam submerges their village.277 Kim Wnil's novella Toyosae e kwanhan myngsang (Meditation on a Snipe, 1979) picks up where “The Pigeons of Sngbukdong” and “Wind Going to the Home-town” leave off, featuring a protagonist who actively protests the disruption to bird populations caused by the polluted Tongjin River. This text, regarded Page 81 →as one of the pioneering works of Korean environmental literature, highlights the mistreatment of both people and the natural world under South Korean military dictatorship. The factory cluster in the novel resembles the Onsan Industrial Complex, which was constructed in the early 1970s and became the source of Onsan disease. Meditation on a Snipe references and echoes the style of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.278 Even more important is the text's environmental cosmopolitanism: it argues that unless Koreans change their interactions with environments, Japan's Minamata and Itai Itai diseases soon will plague Koreans as well. For its part, creative work such as Kim Kwanggyu's poem “Kohyang” (Hometown, 1979) examines how such conditions change conceptions of home: Fish with crooked backs live in the Han River. Bearing baby fish with crooked backs, even though they gasp, choking they cannot leave the sewers of Seoul. They don't go to the sea. A place which cannot be departed, and now a place to which there can be no return, is the hometown a place like that?279 The original Korean reads: (tng i kubn mulgogi tl)/ (Hangang e sanda)/ (tng i kubn mulgogi tl nak’o)/ (summakhy hlttkimy kraedo)/ (Seoul i sigungch’ang ttnaji mot handa)/ (pada ro kaji annnda)/ (ttnagal su mnn kot)/ (krigo ijen toragal su mnn kot)/ (kohyang n krn kosinga). To most readers, “Hometown” is first and foremost a poem on the plight of those living in a divided Korea: the border between North and South has broken apart countless families and isolated people from their ancestral homes; individuals living in the South whose hometowns are in the North, and those living in the North whose hometowns are in the South, are forever trapped on the “wrong” side of the border, at least geographically. The poem's setting on the Han River intensifies the sense of both prohibited departure and forbidden homecoming. Because the Han River flows into the Yellow Sea at the DMZ, navigating downstream is not an option. Moreover, although the Han River's primary source is the Namhan (South Han) River Page 82 →in South Korea, its secondary source is the Pukhan (North Han) River in North Korea, which originates in the Kmgangsan (Diamond Mountains), one of North Korea's most celebrated sites. South Koreans have been allowed to visit the Diamond Mountains only since the late 1990s, and only in a separately administered tourist region. The Han River is a literal confluence of North and South, but there is no physical return for those from the North. Published less than a week before the assassination of Park Chung Hee, “Hometown” also points to the traumas of being trapped within a toxic social and political climate.280 Just as significant, the poem clearly addresses the ecological devastation that characterized parts of Korea in the late 1970s. The first six lines (two-thirds) describe the plight of diseased fish (tng i kubn mulgogi tl) and their similarly diseased offspring (tng i kubn saekki tl); the former live in the Han River, which runs through Seoul, and the latter gasp for breath in Seoul's sewers (sigungch’ang), one of which—at least in the 1970s—was the Han

River itself. Conditions decline rapidly: while the parents live, their trapped children struggle for breath. The shift from “[they] don't go to the sea” (pada ro kaji annnda) to “a place that cannot be departed” (ttnagal su mnn kot) suggests that circumstances continue to deteriorate.281 It is not simply that the fish do not leave the city's polluted waters; likely incapacitated by their deformed backs, and, in the case of the fry, unable to breathe, they are not strong enough to do so. And so they remain trapped in Seoul's sewers. The following two lines speak more generally of place—of a place which cannot be departed (ttnagal su mnn kot), the polluted waterways of Seoul, and of a place to which there now can be no return (krigo ijen toragal su mnn kot), the pristine waterways of Korea—while the final line asks whether the hometown (kohyang) is just such a site. In so doing, the poem for the first time since the title points to the human condition; the word kohyang appears only twice in “Hometown,” as the first word (the title) and as the subject of the final line. The human plight can be said to frame “Hometown,” and certainly people's circumstances can often resemble those of trapped and diseased fish. But like many postwar Korean creative works, Kim Kwanggyu's poem is best understood as grappling with both human and nonhuman suffering. South Korean creative attention to environmental degradation increased in the 1980s and 1990s, as damage to ecosystems grew more severe. Unlike elsewhere in East Asia, poetry rapidly became the favored medium for addressing ecological degradation and has remained so into the twenty-first century thanks to such figures as Ch’oe Sngho, Ch’oe Sngja, Chng Hynjong, Kim Ch’unsu, Kim Hyesun, Kim Kwanggyu, Ko n, Mun Tksu, Page 83 →Song Sugwn, and Yi Hynggi, whose texts are discussed in the following chapters.282 South Korean writers including Cho Sehi also have published a number of novels and short stories that address harm inflicted on everything from individual animals to entire ecosystems.283 As is true of other literatures, some South Korean creative texts focus on human abuse of environments, while others make only passing reference to it. But more so than most creative corpuses, South Korean literature that addresses ecodegradation depicts it as closely related to human-on-human abuse; as in Kim Kwanggyu's “Hometown,” literary texts frequently integrate discussions of the former—particularly degradation resulting from war and industrialization—into those of the latter. This dynamic occurs in everything from Cho Sehi's Nanjangi ka ssoaollin chagn kong (Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf, 1978), one of Korea's first novels to speak extensively of industrial pollution, and Yi Namhi's novel Pada ro put’ i kin iby l (Long Parting from the Sea, 1991), an account of Onsan disease, to the internationally celebrated dissident writer Kim Chiha's “Minjung i sori” (Cry of the People, 1974), a lengthy poem decrying myriad types of injustice, including environmental degradation.284 While the narrator of Long Parting from the Sea accentuates the bodily damage caused by heavy-metal poisoning and the narrator of Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf plays up the high human cost of industrialization, the speaker of “Cry of the People”—writing not long after the 1973 Yom Kippur War—gives more space to the economic consequences of policies that increased the country's reliance on imported oil.285 But these three texts leave no question as to the deadly effects of pollution on people and the nonhuman alike. Other contemporary South Korean creative writing addresses changes close to home that have worldwide resonance, including global warming.286 The second part of Hwang Tonggyu's poem “SOS” (S.O.S., 1993), for instance, features a speaker lamenting that the Han River no longer freezes in winter, speculating that “winter must have disappeared for good,” and reminiscing about the days “when ice lived.” To be sure, his principal focus is his own yearning to hear the sounds of cracking ice. He concludes “S.O.S.”: “I want to go inside the sound of cracking ice. / Please send me inside the sound of cracking ice. / Please send me to that dawn / when ice lived inside time. / Ah, once again, / the sound of cracking ice!”287 But the speaker also points to the dangers of a land without winter; houses in the village now remain damp year-round, a situation that if not resolved likely will result in their disintegration and the eventual crumbling of society itself. In its early years Korean-language scholarship on literature and the environment focused largely on the output of Western figures such as Rachel Page 84 →Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gary Snyder, and Henry David Thoreau, all of whom have been popular with South Korean environmentalists, writers, and academics since the 1970s.288 Gary Snyder's deep involvement with East Asian societies, philosophies, and religions made his oeuvre particularly attractive to South Koreans. But today scholars are increasingly reconceptualizing late twentiethcentury Korean literature as deeply concerned with both human and nonhuman suffering.289 So too are South

Korean environmental groups and the public. Since 2002 the South Korean Citizens’ Movement for Environmental Justice has held an annual Environmental Book Festival to encourage reading on the environment; titles for recommended reading are drawn primarily from Korean and Western literatures but also include texts from elsewhere in Asia. Like most literatures, that from South Korea generally does not propose explicit solutions to environmental problems. But it does address many of the peninsula's ecological dilemmas and engage with the complexities of their origins, proliferation, and mitigation.

Environmental Degradation in Taiwan People have lived on Taiwan and nearby islands for at least eight millennia, but before the seventeenth century their numbers remained relatively small, and there is little indication that their behaviors affected ecosystems significantly. So it is not surprising that when Portuguese sailors landed on Taiwan in 1544 they were so captivated by the island that they named it Ilha Formosa (beautiful island) in honor of its verdant cover and abundant natural resources. The first noteworthy human changes to Taiwan date to early seventeenth-century migrations by mainland Han Chinese, who opened spaces to agriculture.290 In the mid-1620s the Dutch East India Company encouraged Chinese to move to the island and cultivate its land. When they were forced from Taiwan in 1661 by the Ming loyalist Koxinga, the Dutch left behind a population of 120,000 recently settled Chinese, as well as a legacy of “crops, domestic animals, irrigation, and a land system for Taiwan's agriculture.”291 Except for the deer population, which plummeted in the 1600s despite Dutch prohibitions against hunting the animal, the island's species and most of its terrain remained intact. Koxinga used the island as a base for potentially retaking the mainland, expanding farmlands and the sugar industry.292 Migration, land acquisition, sugar production, and resource utilization increased under the Qing, who incorporated Taiwan into China in 1683 and ruled the island loosely until 1894.293 Qing authorities adopted policies aimed at minimizing disturbances to aboriginal populations Page 85 →and ecosystems, but these ultimately did little to prevent rapid agricultural expansion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time the island was colonized by Japan (1895), the western and northeast plains, uplands, and hillsides had been almost entirely deforested for cultivation, and some portions of the eastern valleys had also been opened up.294 The island's population topped 2.5 million, most of whom were Han Chinese.295 Taiwan's colonization brought with it sizable changes to human interactions with ecosystems. The Japanese government almost immediately nationalized all land not privately owned. This meant that most of Taiwan's woodlands came under colonial control. Japanese land surveys led quickly to developing, with the help of Taiwanese, a modern lumber industry that harvested Taiwan's lower-altitude forests, especially camphor trees. Although substantial, deforestation did not cause major problems during the colonial period.296 In contrast, from the very beginning the sugar industry played a central role in Japan's expansion of Taiwan's economic output, opening new lands for farming and dozens of new factories for sugar refining.297 Likewise, building Taiwan's first hydroelectric reservoir in 1934 greatly disturbed local ecosystems as it trebled the island's electric capacity, marking the beginning of its industrialization and significant transformations of its varied landscapes.298 The retreat of the Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang, KMT) from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949, four years after decolonization, increased the island's population by several million. This growth, combined with rapid industrialization and economic development under a military dictatorship that smothered opposition and harshly punished dissenters, led to unchecked exploitation of the island's ecosystems and unprecedented pollution of its land, water, and skies. Demand for wood and foreign exchange increased sharply, as did the quality of tools, machines, and transportation methods, resulting in several decades of hyperdeforestation. With numerous nonhuman species unable to survive such timberland fragmentation, changes to Taiwan's biodiversity were substantial. The human cost was also considerable, as the number of people affected by pollution diseases and other ailments rapidly multiplied. Deforestation slowed in the early 1970s, when Taiwan's industries became self-financing and no longer required income from wood exports.299 In contrast, tempering other forms of degradation awaited sustained environmental campaigns. Taiwan's antipollution protests and nature conservation movement date to the early 1980s; surveys revealed that by the mid-1980s nearly 90 percent of Taiwanese believed their island's environmental problems

serious or very serious, leading increasing numbers to demand curbs Page 86 →on ecodegradation.300 But damage to Taiwan's landscapes was addressed in earnest only after martial law ended in July 1987. The gradual democratization of the country strengthened existing environmental movements and stimulated new ones, most notably the antinuclear effort, which delayed nuclear power plant construction.301 Taiwan's indigenous tribes also played important roles in efforts to improve conditions by protesting deforestation, disposal of nuclear waste on aboriginal lands, and other behaviors harmful to the island's human and nonhuman populations.302 One of the most note-worthy and prolonged cases involved the Taiwanese government's decision in 1974 to build a temporary nuclear waste-disposal facility on Orchid Island, off the southeastern coast of Taiwan and home to the Tao aboriginal tribe. The government deceived the Tao, claiming it was building a fish cannery, and admitted the truth only belatedly. Authorities have promised to remove some of the waste from the island, but negotiations continue. Late twentieth-century Taiwanese environmentalists were inspired by their counterparts in other nations who had been successfully protesting environmental degradation since the postwar period. They translated key Western texts on damage to ecosystems, the first of which was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (trans. 1969). This work's relatively rapid translation belies the difficulties plaguing Taiwanese eager to ameliorate and prevent damage to their own landscapes.303 Taiwanese writers have participated actively in the island's environmental movements since their start, joining campaigns to rescue endangered species and spaces, modify industrial development projects, and limit human behaviors harmful to ecosystems.304 In addition, since the 1980s they have published an impressive array of environmental nonfiction, much of which has scientific roots: travel and historical reports that emphasize Taiwan's diverse ecologies, ecological essays, compositions that objectively address environmental problems, and what commonly is referred to in Taiwan as “nature writing” (ziran shuxie, ziran xiezuo). Definitions of the latter vary. The scholar, translator, and ecopoet Yang Mingtu believes “nature writing” to be “pieces of writing that record the phenomena of nature and the activities of birds, insects, plants, and other living organisms in the wilderness…[and that] inspire people's love [and respect] of nature.”305 Liu Kexiang, Taiwan's preeminent nature writer, is careful to distinguish between this genre and conventional landscape literature, emphasizing the former's foundation in scientific observation and engagement with scientific terminology: The language employed in nature writings abounds with elements of natural science and informative descriptions. Often there is a long period of survey work from a fixed location in the field, with a special Page 87 →emphasis on the experience and time-space qualities of the actual setting on the ground. The authors…are fully cognizant of the omnipresence of metropolitan civilization, that there is no escaping it in this world.306 The concern of Liu Kexiang and other Taiwanese writers of nonhuman-centered nonfiction with defining the parameters of this genre suggests a certain amount of anxiety about its form, at the same time that it signals a key moment in Taiwanese writing about environments. Many of these narratives celebrate Taiwan's natural beauty and biodiversity, emphasizing all that the island has to lose if current behaviors continue unabated. In the 1980s nature writers often turned to their classical counterparts, seeking inspiration from depictions of beautiful landscapes in texts by Zhuangzi, Wang Wei, Tao Yuanming, and others.307 During the following decade they frequently condemned exploitation of nature, exposing the disturbing realities of environmental degradation. As the Taiwanese writer Lin Wenyi's essay “Zai huchenghe youan” (On the Right Bank of the City Moat, 1993) declares: Cars roar by without a moment's rest, their exhaust pipes disgorging carbon monoxide as they cross Zhongxing Bridge, from Taipei to Erchongpu and Xinzhuang, from Erchongpu to Taipei…For many many years the waters of the Danshui were as they were a century ago, clear and sweet enough to drink, abundant with fish and shrimp. But today there isn't a bit of oxygen in the utterly dead Danshui River. What kind of nourishment can travelers from the north [wild geese] get from this river?308 Much nonfiction nature writing encourages various forms of resistance and changes in environmental policy.309 In the last few decades this genre has notably increased Taiwanese consciousness of the need to repair the island's

ecosystems.310 Thanks largely to the efforts of committed environmentalists, writers, and other concerned citizens, and despite increased economic growth, industrialization, and consumerism, Taiwan's ecohealth has improved markedly since the late 1990s. Even so, many problems remain unresolved. These include persistent pollution of air, water, and soil in certain areas, as well as threatened biodiversity, largely because of unregulated industrial development, high energy demands, and improper disposal of nuclear and other waste.311 Particularly worrisome is the development of Taiwan's mountainous regions; Page 88 → “garbage waterfalls” as long as 400 meters are not uncommon in the mountains of central Taiwan, some of which have been dynamited to facilitate transport of lumber. Taiwan is only one-tenth the size of Japan but annually expropriates ten times more land for industrial use.312 Helping improve Taiwan's ecosystems has been the export of nuclear and other waste to China, North Korea, Russia, and the Solomon Islands.313 Taiwan also has relocated to other parts of the world corporations with substantial environmental violations. Most egregious among these is Formosa Plastics, the world's largest producer of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), whose practices in Taiwan were so destructive and safety violations so appalling that in the late 1970s and early 1980s large public protests over the company's proposed expansion led it to move some of its operations to the United States. Its plants have caused untold damage to people and environments in Delaware, Louisiana, Texas, and several other states. The American writer and activist Diane Wilson's novel An Unreasonable Woman (2005)—a powerful account of the struggle against Formosa Plastics and its many American facilitators—captures the irony: Our great state of Texas handed an outlaw polluter over two hundred fifty million dollars in incentives just to come here…We pay it. And that money is going to a polluter that would have come here anyway, because it isn't the incentives or the tax packages that draw these companies. What draws them is our cheap oil and our plentiful land and our fresh water and the bays to dump their waste and carry their plastic products hither and yon…Little rural community. Fishermen. Not much education.314 That Formosa Plastics did not pay but instead was paid by Texans and other Americans to relocate augments the paradoxes of environmental degradation. An Unreasonable Woman is a reminder not only of the multidirectionality of ecological currents, both literal and figurative, but also of the complex economic and ecological factors underlying people's interactions vis-à-vis both one another and their environments.

Taiwanese Literature and Environmental Degradation Taiwanese fiction and poetry have attempted to negotiate many of the same issues as their nonfiction counterparts. Whether penned by residents of Taiwan Page 89 →or by visiting Chinese, Japanese, or Europeans, most creative discourse on Taiwan's environments published before the 1950s comments on, even celebrates the island's ecosystems or applauds, rather than criticizes, their shaping by humans; significant “damage” to environments is depicted as resulting largely from floods and other seemingly “natural” disasters, not from human behaviors. For instance, the eighteenth-century Chinese official Lan Dingyuan, responsible for many early transformations of the island's landscapes, believed his projects increased the island's beauty: “Little by little, malaria stricken lands / Were fashioned, and then refined, until they were resplendent. / The finer qualities of streams and plains showed forth in all their magic, / Nor could the thickset growth stay undeveloped.”315 Two centuries later, Nishikawa Mitsuru, one of the most active colonial Japanese artists based in Taiwan, wrote Sairy ki (Sulfur Expedition, 1942), a novella about the seventeenth-century Chinese explorer Yu Yonghe's journey to Jilong and Danshui in search of much-needed sulfur.316 Yu Yonghe is portrayed as menaced by insects, birds, wind, floods, and hollows boiling over with sulfur, but nevertheless he marvels at Taiwan's landscapes. The text claims that this expedition, always in need of firewood for its cauldrons and desiring a direct trail to the sulfur hollow, works on cutting a path through “a primeval forest that for hundreds of years had escaped felling.”317 Nishikawa's story contrasts aboriginal with Chinese treatment of the environment. On the other hand, later references to this forest in Sulfur Expedition reveal that Yu Yonghe's expedition inflicted only minimal damage. As the Japanese artist Fujishima

Takeji enthused in 1934, “[Taiwan is] a virgin place preserved for us painters.”318 And most early twentiethcentury Japanese writing about Taiwan and other southern islands deploys the standard tropical images of flourishing ecosystems replete with exotic birds, palm and banana trees, flowers, coconuts, and moonlight.319 Colonial-period Taiwanese writers were somewhat more ambiguous about ecological conditions and human interactions with environments, attitudes that were not surprising considering how the Japanese reshaped the island's landscapes. Returning home from Japan, the narrator of Yang Kui's Japanese-language short story “Shinbun haitatsufu” (Paperboy, 1934) notes: “I gazed at springtime Taiwan from the deck of the grand Hrai Maru. On the surface it was beautiful and fleshy, but one prick would reveal a spray of stinking, putrid, bloody pus [omote koso bibishiku himan shite iru ga, hitohari atareba, akush punpuntaru chiumi no tobashiri o mirude arau Taiwan no haru o mitsumeta].”320 The Chinese translation of this short story accentuates both the island's surface beauty and its damaged interior. It also emphasizes that Japanese imperialism is responsible for its unstable position: Page 90 →“This Jewel Island, under imperialist Japanese colonialism, had a sumptuous, fleshy surface, but inserting a single needle would reveal a spurting of threat-eningly putrid, bloody pus [Zhei baodao, zai Riben diguozhuyi de tongzhi zhi xia, biaomian suiran zhuang de fuli feiman, dan zhi yao chajin yi zhen, jiu hui kandao echou biren de xuenong de bengliu!].”321 In these lines, which conclude the story, the narrator is most clearly alluding to his own hopes of reforming economic and social conditions in colonial Taiwan and seeking vengeance for the abuse of his family. But his comments also reveal the sometimes precarious position to which Japanese colonialism consigned Taiwan's ecosystems.322 In Ajia no koji (Orphan of Asia, 1945), a novel focusing on cultural conflicts in the colonial period as well as the difficulties faced by foreign-educated Taiwanese intellectuals, the Taiwanese writer Wu Zhuoliu also reveals the complex negotiations of colonial Taiwanese with both Japanese policy and the island's biophysical environments: “Taiming wasn't the only one who had changed. When he at long last returned home on vacation, his family's carefully conserved pine forest had been completely felled, adopting a cruel appearance. Having heard the rumor that all forests were to be taken over by the Japanese, his family had hastily cut down their trees. They then learned that the Japanese wanted simply to monitor woodlands, not seize them.”323 Here it is Taiwanese who destroy flora, believing that if the annihilation of their forest is inevitable they at least should be the ones to deal the final blows. But when the Japanese are revealed as having no designs on these woods, or at least far less destructive plans than the Taiwanese had imagined, what first appeared to be a defensive strategy takes on aggressive overtones. Environmental concerns played only a small part in Taiwanese creative work published in the first few decades of the postwar period; in those years Taiwanese literature was characterized by anticommunist propaganda (1950s), a largely Western- but also Japanese-influenced modernist movement (1960s), and a populist, nativist movement (1970s).324 Since the 1980s, Taiwanese literary production has been more diversified and often market driven. Writing centered on the natural world has flourished in this environment. Nature writers and other Taiwanese in the 1980s and subsequent decades who speak of the nonhuman in their creative work draw at least in part from the insights and achievements of the nativists, who vocally condemned key aspects of the country's economic and social policies and focused on lives and landscapes outside Taiwan's metropolitan centers. Nativist literature generally is concerned with the plight of rural individuals, victims of Taiwan's increasingly capitalist, urban, and materialist culture. However, this genre does not neglect damage to nature. Page 91 → Much late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Taiwanese literature comments on or even celebrates the island's natural beauties and nonhuman vigor by glossing over ecological degradation (e.g., featuring a site known to have been environmentally compromised yet remaining silent about its condition or even depicting it as flourishing), or confining itself to evocations of spaces that have not been notably damaged by human behaviors. These texts include what commonly is regarded as creative “nature writing,” imaginative writing that focuses on the natural world and often is penned by individuals who also have published nonfiction nature writing such as ecological essays and travel and historical records with an ecological focus.325 Also included are writings in which relationships among human beings are the focus but that interweave at least minimal discussion of the nonhuman.

In the last few decades many different types of Taiwanese creative works also have decried or otherwise addressed environmental degradation. Taiwan's literary artists, including those from the island's indigenous tribes, often speak of the beauty of Taiwan's landscapes, but they depict this beauty as something that is on the verge of disappearing, if not something that already has vanished or even vanished long ago. For instance, in the Taiwanese writer Zheng Qingwen's short story “Bian” (Braids, 1989) the first-person narrator interrupts his description of the fishing habits of a man from his hometown to comment on how much the landscape has changed in the last forty years: Back then, if I ran into him on the street, he was always carrying a creel. If he wasn't going out fishing, he was returning from fishing, or he was taking fish to the market. At that time the rivers weren't yet polluted, so there were still many fish in the lakes and rivers. If Jinchi was returning from fishing or headed to the market, his creel was always full of large eel and catfish weighing more than two pounds and carp that were even bigger. These days you don't see eel or catfish that big.326 Likewise, the narrator of Zhu Tianxin's novella Gudu (Ancient Capital, 1996), set in 1990s Taiwan and an intriguing exploration of the construction and deconstruction of multiple cultural identities, as well as a striking example of intertextual literary negotiation, opens with: Is it possible that none of your memories count? The sky back then was much bluer, so blue it made you feel as though the ocean weren't that far away, pulling you toward it…the sun penetrated intensely Page 92 →through clean air that had never been blocked…The trees back then…could grow exceptionally tall and big, exceptionally green, resembling those in countries in tropical rain forests…Summer nights back then displayed the Milky Way and shooting stars.327 Ancient Capital is not “about” compromised physical environments, but these early references to deleterious ecological changes—echoed throughout the text—instantly alert the reader that more than individual memories have been lost. In fact, as the Taiwanese writer Yang Mu's three-stanza prose poem “Gaoxiong, 1973” (1973) suggests, a creative work need not speak at length about ecodegradation to have it serve as a conceptual focus; at times, a brief mention in a single strategic location is all that is required for ecological devastation to pervade the creative work conceptually.328 Yang Mu wrote “Gaoxiong” three years after receiving his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley; he had decided to remain in the United States after graduation to protest the totalitarianism of Chiang Kaishek's regime. As Michelle Yeh has noted, he was particularly opposed to how this regime repressed free speech, discriminated against native Taiwanese, and compromised Taiwanese autonomy by making concessions to the United States, Japan, and other foreign investors.329 The latter concern is prominent in “Gaoxiong,” which features an individual visiting the free-trade zone by Gaoxiong Harbor (southwest Taiwan) who comments sarcastically on the disparity between the pride of a senior harbor official in Gaoxiong having become China's largest harbor and his own shame at seeing tens of thousands of impoverished female workers whose undercompensated labor symbolizes Taiwan's economic exploitation. This text was so offensive to Taiwanese officials that within days of its publication it was torn out of the volume in which it first appeared.330 On the other hand, it is not just people who are being abused. “Gaoxiong” makes two pithy but important references to environmental harm at Gaoxiong: in the second section it cites the senior harbor staff member's comment that when he first arrived in the area “the harbor's color was determined by war [zhei gang de yanse ruhe wei zhanzheng suo jueding]” and in the third section it indicates that “waste oils are floating on the water [feiyou piao zai shuimian shang].” The second stanza also remarks on the decline of both Shanghai's harbor and Taiwan's Deer Harbor because of excessive sedimentation. These lines cast an ecodegratory shadow over the poem's other more ambiguous utterances; the speaker suggests that the unease permeating his being has at least something to do with Gaoxiong's growth and ecological decline. Written the same year as the oil crisis triggered Page 93 →by the Yom Kippur War, a time when Taiwanese planners were pressing industries to develop more efficient modes of production, “Gaoxiong” addresses the nation's overconsumption of foreign fuel even as it focuses primarily on human abuse.331 Most scholarship on writing and environment in Taiwan focuses on nature writing, both fiction and nonfiction.332

Yet when probing Taiwanese literature's multiple relationships with environments it is crucial to consider not only “nature drama,” “nature fiction,” and “nature poetry” but instead the full range of creative texts that address environmental degradation, even those that speak of it only in passing. Like its nonfiction counterpart, naturecentered creative production tends more readily to increase awareness of the nonhuman. Whether or not it speaks of ecodegradation explicitly, it often augments appreciation of the significance of human relationships with environments more than does literature with briefer references to flora and fauna. As Nick Kaldis has noted, Liu Kexiang and many other nature writers believe human experience of nature is fraught with irreversible choice, permanent loss, and a knowledge of the burden of being responsible for one's own fate, as enacted in one's representations of attitudes and actions toward the environmental other. This awareness is the origin of an anxiety one finds at the heart of much Taiwan nature writing…It is an anxiety that, directly expressed or left implicit, runs like a shudder just beneath the surface…Nature writing, at its best, creates and sustains unresolved states of anxiety.333 At the same time, nature writing is not the only Taiwanese discourse to sustain unresolved states of anxiety concerning the environment. As this book demonstrates, creative works on ecodegradation that engage with ecoambiguity but are usually not considered nature writing—including texts by Bai Qiu, Bai Xianyong, Chen Huang, Huang Chunming, Rongzi, Shang Qin, Topas Tamapima, Xin Yu, and Yu Guangzhong from Taiwan—likewise frequently exhibit apprehension.334 Taiwan's dramatists, poets, and fictional prose writers have published an impressive corpus that gives complex and often conflicting impressions of interactions between people and the nonhuman in their own society, East Asia, and the world. Analyzing creative discussions of those relationships that involve ecological degradation, regardless of the genre in which they appear, gives us not only a more comprehensive picture of Taiwanese literature but also a heightened consciousness of relationships between literature and the environment more generally. Page 94 → Without question, East Asia is experiencing considerable ecological unrest. As In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim have argued: High rates of economic growth, large populations, and growing energy demands are turning [East Asia] into an environmental “hot spot.” How the region responds to its increasingly serious pollution problems and increasing constraints on natural resources can have major implications for quality of life, long-term sustainability, and interstate relations within the region and beyond.335 In China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as in most of the world, intentional and immanent environmental problems are difficult enough to address; slow-moving and unplanned events including gradual poisoning of air, water, and soil, and especially such phenomena as global warming and species extinction have yet to galvanize a reaction powerful enough to translate into significant behavioral changes.336 Inspired by the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and talk of establishing nature reserves in the DMZ, experts have proposed creating a Northeast Asian Biodiversity Corridor that would connect critical habitat in Russia, China, and the Korean Peninsula and ideally bring some relief to the region.337 Where then does this leave literature? And the study of literature? East Asian creative writing has been addressing ecodegradation for millennia and with particular urgency since the 1960s. Although intra–East Asian transculturation of creative texts on human damage to environments has not been as frequent as might be expected considering the many other postwar literary contact nebulae in the region, intercultural thematic and conceptual networks that address ecological problems are thriving as never before.338 Particularly intriguing are the many different forms of ecoambiguity that are the focus of the following chapters. But in addition to analyzing and closely reading literary mediations of the complicated and often conflicting relationships between people and environments, the next chapters also argue for increased attention not primarily to the cultures of any single nation or region, but rather to the global cultures of environmental degradation, and to those of their frequent subsets and facilitators: cultures of environmental ambiguity.

In the preface to his recent Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, Iraq, the Japanese historian John W. Dower reveals that while researching this book, he found himself returning to “all the clichés about the uniqueness of Japanese culture…and asking new questions not merely about Japan and the United States and other Allied powers all those decades ago, but also about war as a culture in and of itself, and why it is always with us.”339 Page 95 →Dower acknowledges that “culture,” in the conventional sense of “distinctive societies bound together by shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and practices,” is obviously important and that cultural differences matter.340 But as Dower, and before him Peter Dale, Kosaku Yoshino, Yoshio Sugimoto, Harumi Befu, and others have stressed, emphasis on cultural uniqueness tends to minimize important variations within individual societies.341 Just as significant, focus on cultural specificity, much less cultural essentialism, also can obscure the even more important resemblances among disparate societies, resemblances that allow us to understand more deeply our common humanity, and in particular the fundamental similarities of contacts between people and environments, throughout time and space, in life as well as in literature. Ecoambiguity regularly transcends cultural, national, and other divides, and it is to literary analyses and close readings of the multiple expressions of this phenomenon that I now turn.

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PART I

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TWO / Accentuating Ambivalence Environmental ambivalence is a hallmark of the Japanese writer and activist Sakaki Nanao's poem “Let's Eat Stars” (1988):1 Page 100 → At once amusingly flippant and disturbingly serious, “Let's Eat Stars” parodies religious and other forms of anthropocentrism; it mocks the belief—articulated in Genesis 1:1 and elsewhere—that a heavenly being created earth's ecosystems entirely for human use and that this deity expects people to conquer (i.e., exploit) them.3 Even more important from an ecological standpoint is the text's striking portrayal of environmental ambivalence: anxiety over human behaviors virtually certain to degrade the earth's landscapes is accompanied by a call to destroy ecosystems outside the planet's biosphere. The poem suggests that one of the very people uneasy with human reshaping of earthly environments sees nothing wrong with literally consuming other celestial bodies. As in many of Sakaki's poems, the final lines of “Let's Eat Stars” position the poem in a specific time and place: “September 1988 / Chbetsu River, Hokkaido.” The text evokes the controversial dam constructed on the Chbetsu River (in the central part of the island) between 1977 and 2007 and the many arguments used to justify building dams more generally. The reference to sunflowers in cultivated fields also points to human shaping of environments prevalent in Hokkaido; the prefecture's sunflower farms and festivals are legendary.4 But the poem itself reaches far beyond Japan's northernmost island. Speaking generally of how humans both abuse ecosystems and justify this abuse, and not specifying time and place until the very end, Sakaki's text addresses patterns repeated globally. In the first two stanzas of “Let's Eat Stars” the poem's speaker attempts to convince skeptical children, if not himself, that God created the natural world precisely for people to visit and reconfigure, in part for sustenance but largely for amusement. The second stanza's second through seventh lines move from the sky down to coral reefs and then inland to cultivated fields, the rivers that feed into and sustain them, the woods that stretch beyond them, and the mountains that reach back up to the skies, thereby bringing the verse full circle. The eighth line speaks of animals, which inhabit all the sites listed in the previous six lines and thus to a certain extent pull together these disparate yet ecologically connected spaces. Referring in the fourth line to “cultivated fields” (hatake) rather than simply “fields” (nohara) or “prairies” (daisgen; purr), the speaker gives his first indication that he believes God created not only nonhuman entities but also human reconfigurations of them, a belief on which he elaborates in the final line of the second stanza and into the third stanza. But the four lines following “cultivated fields”—speaking of rivers, woods, mountains, and animals—return the focus to seemingly less constructed nonhuman bodies. “Let's Eat Stars” declares that these seven things were made purposely for humans to use (and abuse) with their air-planes, tourism, agrochemicals, dams, golf courses, ski resorts, and zoos. Page 101 →Significant here is that the poem does not implicate urbanization or industry, the most obvious culprits of environmental degradation. Instead, Sakaki's text focuses on things that can give the illusion of harmonious interactions between people and nature; agrochemicals, zoos, and even dams can benefit the nonhuman, agrochemicals by stimulating plant growth, zoos by rescuing endangered species, and, albeit more controversially, dams by creating new ecosystems. Repeating the phrases “for” (no tame ni) and “make” (tsukuru), the second stanza's second through eighth lines insist on the validity of two assertions: nature is not so much natural as it is constructed (made), albeit by a heavenly being, and, even more important, it is constructed with the express purpose of pleasing people. Where the Bible speaks in general terms of occupying and conquering the earth and mastering the animals, “Let's Eat Stars” indicates how these directives might be fulfilled. The second stanza's ninth and final line adds an intriguing twist: “[God] Made cars for traffic accidents” (kts jiko no tame ni jidsha tsukuri). In the wake of seven lines on God's handiwork, the poem's speaker—following up on the reference to “cultivated fields” in the fourth line—here suggests that cars are as much God's creation as are animals and their diverse habitats. In so doing, blurring the boundaries between human and heavenly creations, the

text at once deprives people of agency and liberates them from responsibility. The implications of this move become more pronounced in the third stanza, where cars are replaced first by nuclear power plants and then by people, while traffic accidents give way to dancing ghosts (presumably including but not limited to the ghosts of the people killed in these accidents) and then to dancing robots (likely replacements for these people and those harmed by nuclear power plants). “Let's Eat Stars” not only depicts the natural world as created for human amusement but also blames some of the most deadly “human” creations (i.e., nuclear power) on a higher power. Most interesting, however, is the children's response to this rhetoric. In the fourth stanza the speaker switches tactics, suggesting that his audience has not been seduced, despite the poem's near numbing repetition. So rather than continuing to justify what has been done to the planet by speaking of the “truth” (as he claimed to be doing in the second and third stanzas), he instead strives to prove simply that everything is truly “okay” (daijbu). He declares that wells continue to produce water, sunflowers bloom in cultivated fields, and red dragonflies take wing in the sunset. Hearing this, yet still unconvinced, someone suggests that they should set their sights beyond the planet earth: “Someone breaks out in song, / Let's eat stars.” This unidentified individual—perhaps one of the children, or an adult who has been listening in—seems unconvinced that the earth can withstand current human Page 102 →behaviors, however seemingly sustainable. But rather than urge that these be curbed, this person instead suggests that people literally devour (tabey) other celestial bodies. “Let's Eat Stars” follows technology's evolution from the agricultural revolution through the automotive revolution and the nuclear age to a time of human and mechanical robots dreaming of colonizing the universe. The sentence “[God] made people so robots dance” (robotto ga odoruy ningen o tsukutta) proved prescient in the final decade of Sakaki's life: the dawn of the twenty-first century saw the development of several types of sunflower robots that danced and even followed human movements.5 Taking the reader from cultivated fields to cars to nuclear power plants, the poem points to the increasing ability of people to manipulate environments. But then, replacing cultural artifacts with human beings in the final line of the third stanza—“Made people so robots dance”—the poem highlights human impotence: people allegedly are made by God for the benefit of robots, the very cultural artifacts they create. It is unclear what if any control people have over their behaviors, not to mention the impacts of these behaviors on themselves and the nonhuman. Taken literally, the poem suggests that humans have very little agency, that they are as malleable as the terrain they reconfigure. The people who earlier in the poem appeared to be following a divine plan in creating airplanes, golf courses, and ski resorts now are described as either dead or irrelevant. Not surprisingly, these sentiments frighten the children, and they must be convinced that they have nothing to fear, that familiar markers remain intact despite relative lack of agency: the sky is made for airplanes, but it continues to feature sunsets and dragonflies; the fields are made for agrochemicals, but this allows even greater numbers of sunflowers to grow. These examples do little to quell anxieties, leading to the exhortation “Let's eat stars!” The poem points to the paradoxical dynamics underlying calls for ecological imperialism, including the colonization of space: believing local resources insufficient or their use at best impractical and at worst threatening too much of the familiar, societies set their sights on larger, distant spaces. Anxiety over changes to some environments is precisely what justifies obliterating others. Sakaki's poem suggests that it is none other than individuals uncomfortable with how people are manipulating the earth who urge the destruction of other celestial bodies.

Ambivalence To be sure, the clearest ambiguities in human attitudes toward the natural world, especially attitudes about the ideal relationships of people with environments,Page 103 → occur not within individuals, as in Sakaki's poem, but instead between seemingly cohesive groups with opposing ideologies. Logging lobbyists usually have very different beliefs about woodlands from forest preservationists; industrial fishers often have very different perceptions of marine life from indigenous fishers. Less noticeable are attitudinal ambivalences within groups: some forest preservationists believe that wide swaths of forest should be completely off limits to people while others think that people should spend more time in wooded areas; some industrial fishers urge voluntary conservation while others promote trawling even in prime breeding waters. Most concealed but arguably most significant are the internal conflicts in attitude that any one individual might hold, consciously or unconsciously,

toward the nonhuman. Sakaki's poem suggests an extreme example: an individual concerned about manipulating the surface of the earth who nevertheless sees nothing wrong with literally consuming other planets. More common is the indigenous fisher who proclaims love of nature yet who might or might not recognize the conflict between this fondness and his belief that nature exists for his benefit, even to the point of depleting stock. And the logging lobbyist who thinks that people have the right to fell trees at will might or might not recognize the disjuncture between this attitude and her deep affection for the flowering dogwoods that line her property. Even when acknowledged, this ambivalence often is simply taken for granted. Individuals and groups can have at once positive, negative, uncertain, or apathetic emotions about different species; individuals and groups also can have multiple views about a single species, or about the natural world writ large. Just as frequently, a single species will induce positive outlooks in some people, negative views in some people, uncertainty in others, and no discernable attitudes in still others. Some emotions change regularly, others less so, but few are unvarying across time and space. Adding further ambiguity, understandings of what constitutes “positive,” “negative,” “uncertain,” and “apathetic” can be very flexible. Also diverging significantly are beliefs and perceptions about people's interactions with surroundings. With social standards forever in flux, perceptions of (in)appropriate lifestyles and of what defines (ir)responsible behavior vis-à-vis environments alter regularly and often are contradictory. Viewpoints vary on what constitutes consequential change to environments and which changes degrade, maintain, or enhance ecosystems. Perceptions also differ on whether changes should be prevented, encouraged, condemned, overlooked, or celebrated; whether changes are mitigated by other changes; and whether changes should be changed, and how and by whom. Creative works addressing human damage to environments highlight Page 104 →many of these expressions of ambivalence, often exploring their etiologies and their connections with empirical conditions and human behaviors.6 These literary texts reveal attitudes toward the nonhuman as inconsistent both within and among individuals and groups. In so doing they point to the complex and often conflicting psychologies underlying much human-induced ecodegradation. Yet complicating matters is the fact that literature frequently does not speak explicitly of internal ambivalences: narrators are often as complicit as their characters in focusing instead on intergroup difference. By teasing out disparities within groups and individuals, this chapter offers nuanced understandings of texts, writers, and their environmental and literary milieus, and it provides new ways of analyzing creative discourse on ecodegradation, and ultimately of comprehending ecodegradation itself. Especially intriguing is how literary works concerned with environmental damage demonstrate the ease with which an individual or group can simultaneously admire a species or a landscape yet accept or even in extreme cases celebrate its destruction. Such internal ambivalence often is overshadowed by the more obvious discrepancies between the attitudes of those who are responsible for major damage to environments and the outlooks of those who directly suffer from and protest this destruction.7 The former—whether governments, corporations, colonizers, or wealthy tourists—frequently are outsiders, relative strangers to the spaces they injure. They are often depicted as technologically sophisticated, seeking profit and pleasure, and harboring antagonistic attitudes toward nature, heedless of the damage they inflict. In contrast, the people who suffer from the ecodegradation triggered by outsiders are frequently portrayed as impoverished, undereducated, and less technically adept, but with deep ties to these spaces, many of which are imbued with spiritual significance. Often such people are described as living in relative harmony with the surrounding nonhuman, a concord shattered with the arrival of logging companies, agribusiness, commercial fisheries, factories, and other large-scale polluters. But living in harmony does not preclude inflicting harm. More revealing even than the disparities between the typical polluters and their victims are the internal conflicts of attitude within groups and particularly within individuals. Groups most affected by environmental damage nearly always include persons who are complicit in it: ecodegradation, like colonialism and other forms of oppression, in many ways relies on local collaborators. In fact, as Japan's Taiji dolphin slaughter and Yanba Dam controversies both demonstrate, local peoples can be among the most vocal enthusiasts for projects involving significant environmental harm, often because of cherished traditions or the promise of economic benefit. The latter explains the concern of some Page 105 →rural Japanese in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima catastrophe, not that the nuclear plants slated for their towns will be built as planned, but instead that these facilities will not be constructed.8 Likewise, groups that spoil

landscapes usually include members who urge restraint on activities most detrimental to ecosystems. Also important are the conflicting beliefs, perceptions, and emotions toward environments that individuals exhibit, whether they revile anthropogenic damage, deny it, or justify it. Most notable is how often denunciations of ecodegradation can be laced with anthropocentrism, showing that people tend to regard the planet largely in terms of human experiences and values. Such subtleties of environmental ambivalence radically complicate the schisms, indeed chasms conventionally mapped out by narrators, characters, critics, and activists between “lovers” and “haters” of nature, between “green” and “antienvironmental” consciousness. These subtleties reveal the snares of starkly opposed analytical categories and bring to light underexplored possibilities for more refined understandings of how people relate to their surroundings. If translated into changed behaviors, some of these understandings could potentially slow human transformations of environments. No ecosystem consists entirely of healthy, flourishing components. Visions of environments with or without people as stable, whole, or integrated are misguided; landscapes are always changing, certain parts thriving at others’ expense or disintegrating to their benefit.9 The human population and per capita impact on surroundings have grown greatly since the early twentieth century. These increases, often seen as inevitable and difficult if not impossible to control, pose problems for remediating damage and preventing further degradation of environments. Marilyn M. Cooper argues that “In the broadest sense, the question that drives the environmental movement is how to resolve the contradiction between the lifestyle of modern industrial society and the continued existence of [diverse] life on earth.”10 This concept needs to be broadened further: all people and societies, no matter how seemingly “ecofriendly,” affect one another and the nonhuman. One objective of environmental discourse is to conceptualize ecosystems where the imputed needs of the nonhuman are better integrated with real human needs and desires.11 Literary works invoking damaged ecosystems frequently negotiate the conflicts that arise between people's (supposed) needs and those of the non-human; these creative texts often also mediate conflicts among the (supposed) needs of different individuals and groups. Narrators and characters often bluntly contrast the attitudes of environmentally oriented individuals with those who blatantly exploit the nonhuman: one common paradigm is celebrating the beliefs, emotions, and perceptions of local farmers and fishers, including Page 106 →indigenous peoples, while condemning those of government and corporate officials. In such an approach, the inner environmental ambivalence of both parties goes unnoticed. But conflicting attitudes, particularly within people with deeper emotional and physical ties to damaged landscapes, are a key part of discourse on human transformations of environments. Arguments against outsiders’ abuse of animals, plants, and other parts of the natural world—whether articulated by a text's narrator or characters—often are accompanied by arguments advocating use of the nonhuman for personal or local benefit. This discourse seldom explicitly justifies the widespread abuse of ecosystems or censures as hypocrites those who condemn destruction of ecosystems. Instead it highlights the ambiguities of conceptualizing mutually beneficial relationships with the nonhuman, let alone instigating productive change. The pages that follow analyze how creative works concerned with damaged environments navigate an individual's or a group's simultaneous admiration of, even attachment to the natural world on the one hand, and on the other, acceptance of or even enthusiasm over the devastation of at least some of its inhabitants. In this context, destruction of the nonhuman, whether individual bodies or entire bodyscapes, usually involves putting nature to human use. This can entail everything from felling a “useful” tree for firewood to removing a “useless” tree to make room for something deemed more “useful.” Most of the creative texts examined in this chapter contrast the ideologies of two distinct groups: those with and those without long-standing ties to a space subjected to environmental injury. Within these parameters I look primarily at the attitudinal ambivalence demonstrated by people with deep connections to the afflicted region. Without critiquing the outlooks or lifestyles of local farmers, fishers, and indigenous peoples whose ecosystems are damaged by outsiders, the aim is to develop more sophisticated understandings of how creative texts grapple with the attitudinal conflicts of the people most affected by devastated environments.

Like humans everywhere, none of the people depicted in the creative works examined here—whether wealthy or impoverished, whether relative newcomers or individuals harboring long-standing emotional and physical attachments to an ecosystem—could survive, much less enjoy a level of comfort, without making a mark on their environments. For this reason, it is unclear whether any human community or individual can truly value the nonhuman for its own sake; E. O. Wilson's character Raff Cody is perhaps the exception that proves the rule.12 At the same time, contradictions arise in the discourse of those who regard ecosystems as wholly for human exploitation, just as in the discourse of those, like many deep ecologists, who claim Page 107 →to value nature entirely for its own sake.13 Labeling groups and individuals as “lovers” or “haters,” as “respectful” or “disrespectful” of nature obscures the very real ambiguities that pervade human attitudes. Focusing on ambivalence—contradictions in emotions, perceptions, and beliefs—grants new perspectives on how people conceptually shape the shaping of environments.

Reconceptualizing Use Striking environmental ambivalence appears in creative works that address the conflicting attitudes toward nature held by people with enduring ties to ecosystems mutilated by outsiders. Deep emotional and physical attachments to their surroundings lead the local fishers, whalers, and hunters in the Japanese writers Ishimure Michiko's Sea of Suffering (1969), Ogata Masato and iwa Keib's Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World (1996) and Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001), and Nitta Jir's Tale of Alaska (1974) to believe these spaces are their own, to use for their benefit, regardless of the potential consequences for both themselves and the natural world.14 The most readily apparent contradiction addressed by Ishimure's, Ogata and iwa's, and Nitta's texts arises between the attitudes of corporate polluters, illegal whalers, and apathetic government officials on the one hand and the outlooks of the people whose environments they severely compromise on the other: the former are relatively indifferent to and the latter deeply concerned with the well-being of environments. More specifically, the former perceive nonhuman bodies primarily as financial enablers, whether as sources of profitable marine life (Tale of Alaska) or as sites to deposit industrial waste free of charge (Sea of Suffering, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, Rowing the Eternal Sea). In contrast, local farmers, fishers, whalers, and hunters believe flourishing ecosystems are the source of their own health. But more intriguing even than the attitudinal conflicts between these two groups is the often unconscious ambivalence of local denizens: deep concern for the well-being of environments combined with the belief that they are entitled to take whatever they wish from these spaces, no matter how imperiled ecosystems already are or might become. Remarkably, all four texts posit disturbing congruencies between the attitudes toward the environment upheld by the outsiders most obviously responsible for its degradation and those of local people who suffer most from its destruction. Although the damage they inflict differs greatly in intensity, both groups assume ecosystems are at their disposal. This dynamic is unique neither to the narratives examined in this section nor to twentieth-century Japanese or East Asian literatures in general. Page 108 →It occurs in a wide variety of creative texts on environmental degradation that pit groups who dramatically compromise ecosystems with which they have limited ties against groups with deeper connections to these landscapes. Analyzing the internal conflicts of these groups and individuals, conflicts of which they generally are unaware and to which narrators rarely refer explicitly, offers fresh vision into ecological damage from all sources. Suffering Worlds As noted in Chapter 1, Ishimure Michiko's novel Sea of Suffering—Japan's most prominent narrative on Minamata disease and a widely known work of environmental literature—is a moving exposé of human suffering in 1950s and 1960s rural Japan.15 The narrator of Sea of Suffering interweaves tales on her own experiences interacting with Minamata patients and their loved ones with accounts of confronting politicians, corporate officials, and even local residents in order to bring justice to individuals poisoned, disabled, and killed by effluent from the Chisso factory in Minamata. She also includes narratives of Minamata sufferers told in their own voices and those of their families and friends. By incorporating poetry, fictional and nonfictional prose, medical, scientific, and journalistic reports, accounts of the rich cultural history of the towns on Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea, and lyrical depictions of the region's landscapes, Sea of Suffering openly defies narrow definitions of genre and, more important, underlines the interdependence of scientific, social scientific, and humanistic interpretations of the

experienced world. Including local dialect whenever possible, the narrator accentuates the distance of Minamata from Tokyo power centers. Ishimure's novel loops back and forth in time, denying human suffering a beginning and an end. Demonstrating an explicitly ecocosmopolitan consciousness, it also denies suffering any clear spatial borders. The narrator speaks repeatedly of the Ashio copper mine incident and Niigata Minamata disease, the latter of which creates in her mind the vision of a “deep, fissure-like pathway [fukai, kiretsu no y na tsro] that with a cracking sound ran the length of the Japanese archipelago.”16 With Minamata located on the western coast of Kyushu, well north of the Japanese archipelago's southern tip, and Niigata on the western coast of Honshu, far south of Japan's northernmost point, the narrator indicates that the tragedies shared by these two cities have reverberated well beyond their axis; not only does the path (tsro) of suffering join Minamata and Niigata, it also extends hundreds of miles farther, to Okinotorishima and Bentenjima, Japan's southernmost and northernmost points. The word tsro is significant: it implies a well-established Page 109 →passageway, but one that separates even as it connects. Not only does it call attention to the fragility of the Japanese islands themselves, fragility accentuated by audible cracking, it also points to the country's many chasms, particularly between polluters and fishers/farmers, the wealthy and the impoverished, and the healthy and the infirm, gaps that threaten the stability of Japanese society. Sea of Suffering also moves outside Japan, exposing the Chisso Corporation's controversial history in colonial Korea, including its factories in Hngnam and damming of the Yalu River between China and Korea.17 The narrator discusses the plight of Koreans under Japanese control more generally, referencing Korean deaths in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In her afterword, Ishimure also condemns Chisso's clandestine attempt in the late 1960s to export to Korea containers of poisonous mercury effluent.18 Here and elsewhere the novel explicitly describes Minamata disease as having regional if not global implications. Like A Cheng's King of Trees, introduced in Chapter 1 and discussed at the conclusion of this chapter, Sea of Suffering depicts government-sanctioned environmental exploitation for economic development. But whereas King of Trees takes place in a socialist command economy where governments directly order resource use, Sea of Suffering takes place in a developmental state; Chisso's close ties with the government are part of an industrial policy organized by private businesses and the national bureaucracy.19 So, not surprisingly, the narrator of Sea of Suffering explicitly condemns state-sanctioned capitalism for encouraging the sacrifice of human life for financial gain. She repeatedly censures the unchecked desire for profits that led Chisso first to dispose of its untreated waste in the waters surrounding Minamata without ascertaining that this would not harm local residents, then to continue doing so—as I discuss in more depth in Chapter 5—even after the toxicity of its emissions became indisputable; she denounces the analogous greed that for decades enabled the Japanese government to condone Chisso's actions, in practice if not always in legislation. The narrator also frequently reproaches Chisso and the Japanese government for failing to admit responsibility, much less compensate or provide medical care for people suffering from Minamata disease. And she asserts that not only the government and Chisso are to blame; many living in the long-impoverished Minamata region were so grateful to the company for improving their standard of living that they turned against neighbors who had contracted Minamata disease and refused to acknowledge their plight. As the narrator observes: “Minamata disease is becoming more and more of a taboo topic among the people of Minamata. They think that if they speak of the disease, then the factory will collapse, and if the factory collapses, the town of Minamata will disappear.”20 Page 110 →On the other hand, the novel does not depict this fear as entirely unfounded. The narrator indicates that some residents of Minamata and its environs were so impoverished before the arrival of Chisso that they fled Japan for China and Southeast Asia, where they toiled as laborers and prostitutes. Nonetheless, highlighting both the physical suffering and the emotional isolation of Minamata patients, the narrator and many of the characters in Sea of Suffering condemn economic, political, and social systems that make it relatively easy to damage human lives. The narrator's and many Minamata residents’ deep concerns with human anguish and human-on-human cruelty contrast sharply with their attitudes toward the natural world. On the one hand, the narrator and most Minamata patients idealize symbiotic, mutually beneficial contacts between people and environments, contacts that in light of Chisso's widespread pollution now exist mainly as memories or aspirations. On the other hand, these same individuals show concerns about the health of the nonhuman primarily because of its direct impact on human

health. Moreover, some Minamata patients explicitly state their belief that the natural world exists for their benefit, to do with as they please and to pass down to their progeny. To be sure, as will be stressed below, neither the narrator of Sea of Suffering nor her characters seem aware of their contradictory attitudes toward their surroundings, unlike Ogata and iwa in Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea, analyzed in the following section. In addition, Sea of Suffering does not explicitly discuss actual or potential effects of this type of anthropocentrism (local people believing nature exists primarily for human consumption) on environments. When Sea of Suffering was published, the actual consequences of these conflicting outlooks appeared minuscule in the areas around Minamata; they still do today, more than four decades later. But factories, power plants, and commercial farming, fishing, and whaling are not the only elements capable of damaging ecosystems; people with far less sophisticated technology also can radically shape their surroundings. The narrator of Sea of Suffering celebrates the harmonious interactions Minamata residents once enjoyed with their surroundings; the novel's opening passage depicts the town's ecosystems before Chisso's arrival as healthy, well-integrated places where people, their cultural artifacts, and the non-human all flourished. The narrator accentuates the synchronization of human and nonhuman life by portraying them as undulating together peacefully: boats and baskets float on gently rippling water, while voices meander through foliage. People disrupt the sea, but only superficially; their splashes in open water are insignificant, while gushing springs enclosed in wells are Page 111 →safe havens for animals. In fact, as the narrator stresses in the novel's opening line, nature, in the form of typhoons, is more disruptive than people: The village of Yud surrounds a small bay where the waves billow only with the typhoons that come once or twice a year. In Yud Bay, small boats, sardine baskets, and the like floated atop gentle ripples that were akin to tickling eyelids. Naked children played there, jumping from boat to boat and splashing in the water. In the summer, the voices of those children rose through tangerine groves, oleanders, tall sumacs with coiled bumps, and stone walls and could be heard in the houses. At the lowest part of the village, at the base of the terrace right by the boats, there was a large old well—the communal washing place. Small minnows and cute red crabs played in the shadows of the moss on the stone walls of the large four-sided well. This kind of well where crabs lived was without a doubt fed by a pure gushing rock spring of soft-tasting water. Around here springs gushed even at the bottom of the sea.21 Speaking first of a human settlement (the town of Yud) as surrounding a small, peaceful nonhuman body (a bay of the same name), then homing in on human cultural artifacts (boats, sardine baskets), followed by people (children) interacting with the larger nonhuman space (Yud Bay), Sea of Suffering points immediately to the water as a peaceful site of human/nonhuman intermingling.22 Although they take life from the waters, small boats and sardine baskets seem almost to have become part of them. The second sentence indicates that waters gently rise and fall, but not because of human intrusion; boats float on rather than cause ripples. In fact, by following the references to fishing vessels and equipment with mention of children jumping among boats and splashing in the water, the narrator emphasizes how little impact trawling has on the waters of Yud Bay. Interestingly, even as boats take life from water, they also to a certain degree protect the water from people; some children jump from boat to boat rather than into the water. Fishing boats and baskets are left behind in the third paragraph, as the narrative moves slightly inland. Here children's voices rise through various nonhuman bodies (plants) and human cultural artifacts (stone walls) and infiltrate other human cultural artifacts (houses) some distance away—water, air, land, people, human creations, and flora all are tied together by voices at play. Even more significant is the scene at the well. The nonhuman home (the Page 112 →bay of the first two paragraphs) and the human home (the house of the third paragraph) here blend into a home integrated in both composition and occupancy. Also noteworthy is how the stone wall and

the house merge into the stone well. A small body of water, the well is surrounded by rocks arranged by people and fed by a rock spring; the gathering place of moss, marine life, and people, this structure built and used by humans is also a comfortable home for the nonhuman. In the fifth paragraph, which shares with the fourth a reference to gushing springs, the spotlight shifts back to the sea. The narrator's careful choice and placement of images in these opening lines reinforce impressions of human/nonhuman symbioses. Taking the reader back to the well and then out again into open waters, the next several paragraphs continue in a similar vein. The narrative lens pans out: to Yud, both town and bay, are added the names of adjacent bodies of water, pieces of land, and human settlements. Then suddenly, in the final paragraph of the novel's first section, the narrator indicates that this region also is home to the greatest number of Minamata cases. After listing the towns and villages most affected by the disease, she concludes: “The Chisso Corporation's Minamata factory had its drain in Hyakken Harbor.”23 This abrupt turn is one of many in Sea of Suffering; the narrative constructs a scene of enduring, near perfect harmony only to undermine it almost completely by displacing fresh, gushing springs that nourish everything from small wells to the sea with factory effluent that poisons ecosystems of all kinds. Besieged in turn by devastated environments, people are both the polluters and the polluted. The narrator later explains, “Organic mercury never appeared directly in front of people. It lurked densely where people went through the routines of daily life—where they fished the mullets, caught the octopuses under the clear sky, and angled in the night, surrounded by the nocticulae. It infiltrated deep into the human body together with people's food, their sacred fish.”24 This passage reveals how the very animals on which the fishers depended for livelihood and life, for physical and spiritual fulfillment, now hasten their deaths, economic and corporeal. The narrator emphasizes that mercury is not an obvious opponent; it does not simply appear in front of people for them to dodge at will: hitobito no shmen kara arawareta no de wa nakatta. Instead, it first “lurks densely” (; bisshiri hisonde ite) in the nonhuman and then, having been consumed, “infiltrates deep into people's bodies” ( hitobito no tainai fukaku moguriitte shimatta no datta). Repeating the character (hiso(mu); mogu(ru)), the narrator stresses not only mercury's stealthy invasion but also its deep penetration of both humans and animals. Yet this reality, even when recognized, does not dampen Page 113 →local people's deep emotional attachments to poisoned waters and animals. For instance, as Yuki, one of the patients, exclaims: “Is there anything more beautiful than fish?…I believe the Palace of the Dragon King [ryg] really does exist on the bottom of the sea. I’m sure it's as beautiful as a dream. I just can't get enough of the sea…I long to go out to sea again, just one more time.”25 By evoking the Palace of the Dragon King (i.e., the palace of the sea god), a frequent presence in myths and legends including that of the fisher Urashima Tar, whose reward for rescuing a turtle is a visit to this magical place, the narrator points to a more innocent time, however constructed. Also noteworthy is her conviction that despite what has happened to Minamata's ecosystems, not everything has been destroyed; if one travels far away from the Chisso factory, great splendor can still be found. Asking rhetorically if there is anything more beautiful than fish, Yuki underscores her wonder for the natural world; she implies that even the magnificent, imagined Palace of the Dragon King is not as glorious as these aquatic animals. The sea that houses fish (in actuality) and palaces (at least in the imagination) pulls at her ever more insistently. The nonhuman continues to entrance the residents of Minamata, but for the most part Sea of Suffering portrays it as discussed—by government and corporate officials, scientists, journalists, teachers, activists, fishers, Minamata patients, and the narrator alike—primarily in terms of its service to people, whether as a vital source of human physical and spiritual nurture or as a convenient space for dumping waste. Clearly, concern for human suffering trumps concern for nonhuman suffering. People are alarmed by the mercury levels in fish primarily because they depend on fish for nourishment. Likewise, people grow worried when confronted by cats with visible symptoms of Minamata disease mainly because they fear the fate of the cats might soon be their own; for their part, scientists study cats precisely because they believe that understanding the suffering of these animals will provide insight into human distress. Few passages in Sea of Suffering decry or even mention animal suffering without immediately linking it to human trauma.26 These priorities are to be expected considering the severe human anguish caused directly by fish and prefigured by cats; human and nonhuman suffering are connected much more intimately here than in texts such as A Cheng's King of Trees, where people might feel as though they too have been felled, or incinerated, but it is the natural

world that has experienced this torture directly. Likewise, violence by people against people is a central part of the Minamata story, one that, as the hybrid and whirling narrative structure of Ishimure's novel suggests, needs to be continuously repeated in words, lest it be repeated in behaviors even more frequently than it already is. But Page 114 →those characters in Sea of Suffering who believe nonhuman suffering worth considering regularly suggest that this is because of its direct connection with human distress. Such privileging of human suffering raises several important questions. How severely must animals, plants, and other elements of the nonhuman damaged by people in turn harm people before people are moved to remediate and prevent further devastation of environments? To what extent are ameliorating and foiling destruction of environments deemed important only when human health is clearly at stake? Ishimure's novel emphasizes that, in the case of Minamata disease, the people who become concerned about or even protest ecodegradation nearly always have little to lose. This includes those who have already become ill (Minamata patients) or even more deeply impoverished (fishers with nothing to catch) as well as concerned outsiders (journalists, intellectuals, artists) who champion causes without making significant personal sacrifices. Sea of Suffering contrasts these two groups with those threatened by economic catastrophe: Chisso, the Japanese government, and the many local residents not afflicted with Minamata disease who are terrified that Chisso will be forced to close its doors. What these groups often fail to realize is that although they in some ways have much to lose economically, they are not as far removed as they might imagine from the experiences of those whose suffering is already visible. Most obviously, the residents of the Minamata area who oppose the anti-Chisso protests are themselves at some risk of contracting Minamata disease. Also important is the narrator's suggestion that Tokyo—home to the Diet officials who eventually are persuaded to travel to Minamata—might in fact be just as polluted as the environs of the Shiranui Sea. Suffering as well from overpopulation and overconsumption, especially of automobiles, the Japanese capital hardly provides a benchmark of ecological health. As the elderly fisher Ezuno notes partway through his rhapsody on the beauties of the sea, discussed later in this section: “I heard that in Tokyo cars line up on the roads, outnumbering people, who can't walk on the roads. Houses and people both are rapidly multiplying, and even sunlight doesn't filter down to them…They say the people in Tokyo live pitiful lives. From what I've heard the fish paste they eat is made of rotten fish…People who live in Tokyo never get to know the taste of fresh fish. They live their entire feeble lives without seeing the sun.”27 Ezuno first claims that cars outnumber people and then that people and their homes multiply rapidly, effectively filling up horizontal and vertical space. City dwellers live under extreme conditions: their homes and automobiles thrive, but they lack space, light, and fresh food, and even their fish paste comes from putrid animals. Ezuno suggests, however unwittingly, Page 115 →that Tokyo officials, already inured to environmental degradation, simply take for granted, however unconsciously, much of what has happened in the Minamata region. In fact, the area's bright sunshine and relatively clear skies can make it appear more ecologically robust than the Japanese capital. On the other hand, if Minamata disease had affected only cats (i.e., if people, unlike cats or fish, could tolerate mercury), would the fishers have had sufficient resources to investigate why these animals were sick? More important, are people who suffer or watch a loved one suffer from an illness as debilitating and horrific as Minamata disease capable of reflecting on non-human suffering? Should they be expected to do so? Sea of Suffering implies that these three questions merit a negative answer and that this is part of what makes preventing and repairing ecodegradation so difficult. The best hope may be concerned outsiders, including the journalists, intellectuals, and artists to whom Ishimure refers, who seemingly have less at stake. But the narrator exposes these persons as fickle: their interest in human and nonhuman suffering lacks the deep roots required for finding solutions. A concern for nonhuman health because of its link to human health closely relates to the view that the nonhuman is in the service of humans, a perception shared even by those with deep emotional connections to nature. In fact, in highlighting such environmental ambivalence (respecting the nonhuman and believing it to be at their service), Sea of Suffering unwittingly posits certain congruencies between local people's attitudes toward the nonhuman and the outlooks of the Japanese government and the Chisso Corporation.28 Japanese authorities and Chisso officials, like high-ranking employees of most governments and corporations, believe ecosystems at their disposal, to be used as they see fit. And in certain ways, paradoxically, so too do the people of Minamata, largely because of their

profound attachments to these bodies of water. Sea of Suffering cites Minamata residents as claiming that the sea “resembles” or is “like” both their own garden, and, even more strikingly, their own sea. The people of Minamata generally stop short of declaring the sea to be “theirs,” preferring to focus on its similarities with rather than identification as personal property, but their repeated assertions of near ownership put them in some awkward positions. At times such attitudes stem at least in part from desperation. As one of the local residents asserts, “I've neither rice paddies nor fields to leave my family. Just the sea, which I think of like my own sea [umi dake ga, waga umi to onaji y na mon de gozasuga; lit. Only the sea, which I think of as something that is the same thing as my own sea].”29 The language could not be clearer. At the same time that this individual laments his destitution, he reveals that it accentuates his perceptions of ownership; Page 116 →lacking rice paddies and fields, he claims the much greater area of the sea. Here poverty, not wealth, enables exaggerated declarations of ownership. Other characters in Sea of Suffering liken the sea to personal gardens that are in no danger of disappointing their owners. Yuki, for instance, reassures her husband Mohei that they will have little difficulty finding fish. She reminds him, “I’ll take you to a place teeming with fish. I've been at sea since I was three; I grew up on a boat. The area around here is like my own garden [kokora wa waga niwa no gotaru to bai]. And anyway, they say Ebisu [the Japanese god of fishers; one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune] has deep compassion for boats with women.”30 Not only is the sea nearly one's own, it is treated as a garden; harvesting the sea as one would a garden is not simply sanctioned, but encouraged. Belief that Ebisu regulates the sea, or at least that he helps ensure a steady catch, appeases concerns that the couple will go hungry. But in so doing it also liberates Yuki and Mohei from responsibility for this space. The area around her home is “like” her garden, but it is not actually hers, so she is not responsible for maintaining its fecundity. For Ezuno, the sea not only is the natural extension of people and their property, from which they can harvest food at will, it also makes them believe the entire planet is at their disposal: “There was the sea, like a field or garden stretching from our houses, and whenever we went, there were fish [waga uchi ni tsuitoru hatake ka, niwa no gotaru umi no soko ni atte, sakanadomo ga itsu itatemo, soko ni otto de gozasuken]…Out on the sea, it's as though the whole world is yours [umi no ue ni oreba waga hitori no tenka ja mo ne].”31 Ezuno does not pronounce that people own the sea, and he stops just short of claiming that the sea resembles their private gardens, declaring instead that the waters stretch out from their houses like fields or gardens of undetermined provenance (hatake ka, niwa no gotaru umi vs. Ezuno's waga niwa no gotaru [umi] and the waga umi of the Minamata resident cited above). But these more ambiguous conditions stimulate more grandiose understandings of possession: it is the world, not the sea, that they believe their own. Perceptions like Yuki's and Ezuno's leave little allowance for endangered stock. To be sure, some fishers advocate gluttony, if only in jest, the narrator noting that the favorite saying of the fisher Masuto was “A fisher who can't eat a bucket of sashimi in one sitting is no fisher.”32 But most who believe fish a gift pride themselves on taking from the sea only what has been sanctioned from above. Ezuno stresses that “Fish are a gift from heaven. We take as much as we need…All our lives we have eaten what heaven has given us.”33 And the narrator remarks that for Yuki and Mohei “the catch was not terribly large; they spent their days fishing in moderation.”34 Together, these Page 117 →and many similar statements underscore the ready fusing of feelings of connection with those of usership rights, a combination that is not inevitable—as texts such as the Iranian writer Simin Daneshvar's short story “Sutra” point out—but one that is strikingly prevalent and can have potentially grave consequences for environments.35 Indeed it is significant that Yuki and Mohei believe there is nothing wrong with continuing to fish even when the supply of marine life has notably decreased; they are proud that they do not take more than they need, but they do not stop to consider what will happen when what they need is more than the waters can provide, a possibility that is not purely hypothetical. Immediately before remarking that the sea is like her own garden and that Ebisu is looking out for her, Yuki notes, “I remember that at that time [when Yuki and Mohei were looking for fish] fish had already disappeared from the sea around Hyakken. But I knew better than the Minamata fishers where there were fish.”36 Not surprisingly, fish populations in Hyakken harbor, where Chisso discharges its wastewater, have

plummeted. Pockets of fish remain in other locations, and people believe that knowledge of the waters, and guidance from the gods, will help sustain Minamata fishers. But Yuki is seemingly undisturbed about these losses and by the fact that she and her husband need to travel farther to find food. Yuki appears unconcerned about both piscine and human futures; the sea is so abundant and the gods so generous that even if one space is depleted there are infinite substitutes just a short boat ride away. And it is not just Yuki; the narrator indicates that over the years many local fishers have exhibited similar tendencies.37 Earlier in Sea of Suffering she describes the time-honored custom of gray mullet fishing in Minamata. She notes that fishers long had “competed with one another for the season's largest gray mullet catch.”38 Beginning in the early 1950s neither they nor their counterparts in nearby Tsunagi could get a single gray mullet to bite, no matter how carefully they tweaked conventional fishing techniques; the populations of other animals also decreased dramatically. The fishers talked with one another about these strange conditions, but their discussions appear to have become snagged in a debate about whether the depletion of marine life in Tsunagi had anything to do with similar events in Minamata. The fishers appear to be uninterested in investigating the reasons behind the sudden disappearance of the mullet, shrimp, gizzard shad, sea bream, lobsters, and other creatures on which they have long depended. Instead, they are said to have sold their fishing supplies and invested in flashier nets, which were not only ineffective but also quickly consumed by a rat population that exploded because of a dearth of cats. Not long thereafter, the narrator reveals, the Page 118 →newly bankrupt fishers began poaching to survive. Lacking the perspective to seek more sustainable alternatives, they believed this was their only choice. Without question, industrial pollution usually involves more rapid and severe damage to the biotic and abiotic nonhuman than do conventional fishing, hunting, and farming by local peoples. But corporate and local attitudes vis-à-vis environments, particularly perceptions of appropriate relationships between people and other species, are not as dissimilar as might first be assumed. Sea of Suffering implicitly raises an extremely important question in this regard. How different is it for a corporation to think it appropriate to use the sea as a dumping ground from a town to assume it can use the sea as its source of nourishment, even if so doing involves hunting down its last remaining fish? Although these two outlooks seem to diverge greatly, when translated into behaviors, as they often are, distinctions can become more ambiguous. As Jared Diamond's Collapse and many other works show, there is little to prevent what seems to be sustainable use from eventually triggering catastrophe. The narrator of Sea of Suffering distinguishes clearly between the villagers’ directly killing animals for survival (killing based on need) and Chisso's indirectly killing animals for profit (killing based on desire for revenue); the former is portrayed as sustaining people, the latter as destroying both people and environments. But a persistent question remains: what will happen when nonhuman reproduction no longer keeps pace with human demand? As Gregory M. Pflugfelder notes, paraphrasing Conrad Totman: When we try to understand the dynamics of human-biosystem relations, it is well to bear in mind that how we humans think about other animals (or about plants) carries little weight when compared to the level of our capacity to manipulate or otherwise affect the world around us. If we need or want something badly enough, and have the capability to obtain it, it seems, we will soon devise a rationale to justify doing so. Sadly, the record of human history suggests that it is a matter of little consequence [as people see it] whether any other members of the biosystem—including weaker humans—are inconvenienced by the enterprise.39 Sea of Suffering is foremost a stirring portrait of the physical and psychological anguish of the human victims of Minamata disease, one that includes many painful passages on the suffering of Minamata patients and their families. Employing local discourse, the narrator never allows the reader to forget that despite the environmentally cosmopolitan implications of Minamata Page 119 →disease, this illness was for many a deeply personal ordeal. Yet Ishimure's novel also sheds important light on conflicting attitudes toward ecosystems, not only between but also within groups and individuals. Most frightening, perhaps, is how regularly these ambiguities go undetected. The novel does not directly address the potential impacts of local people's attitudes, when translated into behaviors, on the long-term health of ecosystems. But it does reveal attitudes toward the nonhuman as complex,

and often contradictory, particularly in cases of significant human suffering brought about by a degraded environment. Manifesting ecocosmopolitanism most directly are the narrator's references to cases of Minamata disease in places far from Minamata and her mention of other instances of human-induced suffering in Japan and elsewhere. Likewise, the narrator acknowledges Minamata disease as but one manifestation of the problematic relationships among people and between people and the nonhuman, relationships frequently independent of culture and nationality. Just as significant, but not addressed explicitly, is the prevalence in many societies of ecoambivalence such as that found in Sea of Suffering. Although often unrecognized, the attitudinal clashes exhibited by Minamata fishers differ little from those of fishers and rural peoples in other parts of Japan, East Asia, and elsewhere in the world. Threatened Worlds Conflicting views about the nonhuman, especially about relationships between people and environments in the Minamata region, are addressed more explicitly in Ogata Masato and iwa Keib's Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World (1996) and its English adaptation Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001) than in Sea of Suffering. Writing three decades after Ishimure, Ogata and iwa had more time to reflect on what Ogata, a fisher and activist from Kumamoto (Kyushu), has condemned as the “Chissoization [Chissoka] of human society.”40 Both Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea accentuate many of the complexities of human/nonhuman interactions articulated in Ishimure's Sea of Suffering, particularly attitudes of fishers toward the nonhuman. Like Ishimure's narrator, Ogata and iwa depict the Chisso Corporation and twentieth-century technology in general as damaging ecosystems on a vast scale, shattering the seemingly harmonious relationships people in the Minamata area once enjoyed with their surroundings. In fact, the narrators explain, in the past there was no need for the word shizen (nature), so intertwined did people believe themselves to be with nature. The narrators’ subsequent anachronistic use of shizen suggests that dynamics Page 120 → now are so different that even those closest to the land have no other way of referring to the nonhuman: “We, as living things, live facing the seas, mountains, trees, and plants. In the old days we didn't use the word ‘nature’ [shizen]. It's only in the last twenty years that it's been used. There was no need for it, simply because our lives were so immersed in nature [shizen]. We thought of the seas and mountains as living things.”41 This comment also indicates the gulf between the relationships of Minamata residents and those of most Japanese with their environments: the term shizen became common in Japanese discourse in the 1890s, eighty years before it supposedly entered the vocabulary of the Minamata area.42 On the other hand, perceiving the seas and mountains to be living things does not preclude harming or at least taking life from them. Many passages in both the Japanese text and its English adaptation high-light discordant attitudes toward environments between government and industry on the one hand and local fishers and farmers on the other—predictable ambivalence for a narrative on industrial pollution. More significant, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea also reveal attitudinal conflicts within groups and individuals, fishers in particular. These conflicts, of which the narrators only sometimes seem aware, show how difficult it is to understand the many nuances of human relationships with other species. Ogata and iwa explain that Ogata's father, a fisher, often referred to fishing as a “duel between souls” [tamashii kurabe]. For instance, he would say, “Today the gray mullet were jumping. But we couldn't catch them all. Today we lost to the souls of the fish”…He often would speak of a duel between the souls [tamashii kurabe]…Fishing at night, we would be stabbed by stonefish and bitten by crabs. When this happened we would scold them, saying, “You old stonefish” or “Damn you, crab!” In this way, both fish and crabs became partners in conversation. That is to say, we were all connected, one with another. Fish, cats, and dogs—they are not the same as human beings, but we talk to them.43 Most obvious here is the conflict between attitudes and actualities. Ogata's father speaks of fish as near equals, in some sense demonstrating respect for nonhuman species, but his comments obscure what he and other fishers are

actually doing to these animals; fish and crabs are less conversation partners than prey. While stonefish might stab and crabs might bite people, people kill these and other sea creatures, and not always swiftly; in fact, conventional Page 121 →methods easily can lead to protracted deaths for wildlife. Ogata and iwa suggest that fishers using motorboats are inferior to those in rowboats, since the former know little about tides and are “not on the same wavelength as the world of fish.”44 Yet even though motorboats pollute the waters, the fishers in these boats potentially reduce the suffering of individual fish via modern harvesting techniques. Just as noteworthy as the discrepancies between attitudes and actualities are the contradictions among attitudes. Minamata fishers believe themselves at once in conversation and in a nearly spiritual duel with sea life; they believe themselves truly integrated with surrounding ecosystems at the same time that they perceive their hunt to be both an intra- and an interspecies competition.45 In Rowing the Eternal Sea and Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World Ogata and iwa contrast conventional rural and contemporary urban attitudes toward the natural world. Yet in so doing they also reveal these attitudes, especially conventional rural outlooks, as themselves inherently contradictory: the people of Minamata, as depicted by Ogata and iwa, pride themselves on their respect for and their deep connections with environments. But they also believe and act as though animals are theirs to own, utilize, and ultimately kill, attitudes shared by fishers in many parts of the world. The fishers’ anxiety over their lifestyles suggests that they are aware of these contradictions; unlike most industrial polluters and their collaborators, fishers recognize a hazy distinction between a large catch and one that is too large. Ogata admits: “When I catch a lot of fish [iwoba takusan totta toki], I think the sea is just fantastic. But if I catch too many, I get scared [anmari toreru to kaette osoroshiku naru]. Taking fish is taking lives. So when too many are trapped in my nets [anmari takusan ami ni kakaruto] I feel as though my life will also be taken. It's not just me. Other fishers say the same things…Once every several years there is a boat with a large catch [takusan iwoba totta fune] that doesn't return to port. Our fears are well grounded.”46 Noteworthy here is Ogata's choice of words, at least as transcribed by iwa. He first distinguishes between catching “a lot” of fish (takusan totta) and catching or trapping “too many” fish (anmari kakaru). Fishers are said to believe the former ideal, in contrast with the latter, which can cost them their lives. Ogata then undermines distinctions between “large” and “too large,” speaking of boats with a “large catch” (takusan iwoba totta fune)—not boats with “too large a catch”—as regularly failing to return to port. Distinctions between “large” (takusan) and “too large” (anmari takusan) are subjective, but this is precisely the point. Behind all the claims and perceptions of transspecies harmony and healthy symbioses lie fears that these are an illusion, if Page 122 →not impossibility. Ogata suggests as much when he continues, “This sense [fear that taking too much from the sea puts our own lives in jeopardy] is surely the natural world's way of stopping us from taking more than we need [hitsuy], and of warning us.”47 He implies that were the “natural world” not to implant such fears in people, greed might lead them to take more than they actually need to survive. Yet in truth people already take more than they need to survive, emboldened by beliefs that fish are gifts from the gods, in this case Ebisu, and that it would be bordering on dishonorable for them to reduce their catch, even under extreme conditions. Contradictions between attitudes—fishers’ belief that they are stewards of the sea as contrasted with their pride in not reducing their consumption of seafood—only magnify with the onset of Minamata disease and the long struggle both to repair the damage inflicted by Chisso and to prevent further human degradation of local environments. In a passage found in Rowing the Eternal Sea but not in the earlier Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, Ogata remarks that although he is loath to moralize or give a précis of Minamata disease, the syndrome had three characteristics: villagers continued eating fish long after everyone else had determined sea-food too dangerous to consume; they continued having children even after bearing sons and daughters with Minamata disease (a pregnant Minamata patient can pass the disease to her fetus just as mercury in a mother's body can pass to her fetus); and they never killed anyone (they did not physically attack Chisso officials and their collaborators) even though so many in the community were poisoned. Ogata is proud of the villagers for restraining themselves, wrapping up his comments on their behaviors as well as his own, “We continued to eat fish, we continued to have children, and we did not kill anyone [at Chisso]. This philosophy of ‘life-ism’ is all we need to stand up against the destructive aspects of modern civilization. There was no need to win a court battle. We had won before we began the proceedings.”48

There is no contradiction between the attitude of “life-ism” and celebrating restraint in dealings with company officials.49 Nor is there necessarily a contradiction between a belief in “life-ism” and continuing to have children, although many might argue that people should not be proud of knowingly bringing into the world individuals likely to be condemned to a lifetime of suffering, no matter how much they are loved.50 But there is a notable disjuncture between the attitude of “life-ism” and the belief that there is no need to win court battles. In a display of empathy for nonhuman suffering rare in texts focusing so heavily on human distress, Ogata comments that it would be impossible to compensate animals for all the anguish they have endured.51 On the other hand, villagers, particularly those afflicted with Minamata disease, Page 123 →have every need to win court battles, one of few effective means of obtaining the compensation funds needed for a comfortable life. Even more significant, particularly in light of Ogata's remarks on nonhuman suffering, is the contradiction between his attitude of “lifeism” and his pride in continuing to eat, and perhaps even sell, poisoned fish. As Ogata himself admits, eating poisoned fish—whether done by cats, birds, or people—results not in sustaining life but instead in serious illness and often death. Deepening the ambiguity is that these fish first must themselves be killed; when people are the ones doing the killing, the sea is transformed into a battleground.52 In their titles Ogata and iwa claim the world and sea “eternal, ” but the animals in these ecosystems are at the mercy of the fishers who profess to idealize them. Ogata carefully notes that his family could have survived quite well without catching fish; unlike the individuals featured in Ishimure's Sea of Suffering they own rice paddies, fields, and woodlots that generate both food and income. Instead, he explains, “We placed complete faith in [animal] life and received it with reverence and gratitude. We felt that Ebisu, the god of the sea, was sharing his bounty with us.”53 Even more important, he says, is his love of fish: “Eating fish is part of my identity; I eat it with great happiness…I even love the smell of fish; it is the smell of life.”54 A more cynical view might be that the smell Ogata enjoys is not the smell of life but that of life taken, and that selling diseased fish makes one complicit in the taking of human life. Several pages later Ogata admits that he “feels apologetic” toward the fish he kills. But such sentiments do not lessen his pride in his or his neighbors’ continuing to trawl for marine life.55 These attitudes are particularly noteworthy in a man so in tune with nonhuman rhythms, one who, going to the hills, claims that he “spoke to the trees and plants” and that “They would answer from afar. Of course they wouldn't do so with voices. It was more like their swaying in the wind, for example, teaching me what life is all about. Feelings mix. It's that sort of sensation.”56 Ogata is hardly alone. Throughout history the hunter has been “a liminal and ambiguous figure, who can be seen either as a fighter against wilderness or as a half-animal participant in it.”57 Hunters, as well as fishers, are often both. In “Shinwa no umi e” (To the Sea of Myth), her prologue to Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, Ishimure Michiko reminisces: “I think of that day [when Ogata launched his wooden boat Tokoyo (Eternal World)] even now. Having harbored unprecedented suffering, and taking on the physiognomy of myth, the Shiranui Sea is beginning to revive.”58 Without question, the region has rebounded from its days as one of Japan's most polluted sites; Minamata has reinvented itself as an environmental model city, complete Page 124 →with Eco Town (an industrial park with a focus on recycling) and Eco Park (on reclaimed land in Minamata Bay). But as Ogata and iwa emphasize in Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, Rowing the Eternal Sea, and other writings, many problems remain. The conflicts, as they have articulated them, are multiple. They exist between powerful outsiders intent on making a profit and impoverished local peoples who are easily manipulated. They exist between individuals afflicted by pollution diseases and people, both outsiders and locals, who do not see themselves as affected by the presence of these diseases, not to mention those benefiting financially from industries whose emissions cause these disorders.59 They also exist between individuals suffering from pollution maladies: different people with different hopes for themselves, their towns, and their ecosystems.60 Most important, these conflicts exist—albeit often surreptitiously—within individuals. In his epilogue to Rowing the Eternal Sea, iwa notes that for Ogata the “solution” is “a return to a spiritual world on Earth, in which everyone and everything has a place. It is a world in which life is respected, worshipped, and celebrated.”61 Yet despite Ogata's and his colleagues’ deep attachments to the nonhuman, despite Ogata's claim at the conclusion of Rowing the Eternal Sea that “Embraced by the mountains and sea / Ego dissolves; self and landscape are one,” addictions to killing and eating, at the expense of human health, lives, and the stability of marine ecosystems, do not conflict as drastically as might be supposed with the behaviors of outsiders that Ogata and iwa criticize so

harshly.62 To be sure, the actions of local fishers rarely have as concentrated an impact on human and nonhuman health as those of large polluters; the fishers do not exhibit anywhere near the same desire for wealth, technology, prestige, or power as do the Chisso Corporation, the Japanese government, and many of their neighbors (individuals particularly concerned with their financial futures). But even though they pride themselves on their humility, the fishers too are not without culpability. In both Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea Ogata comments, “For me, [the reclaimed land in Minamata Bay] is in a word a place to apologize [sore wa wabi o ireru basho]. It is a place to apologize not for others but for myself [mizukara susunde wabi o irey to omou]. It is a time to think of my own crimes.”63 Rowing the Eternal Sea elaborates on questions of individual and collective guilt. Ogata asserts that even though he completely opposes Chisso and its practices, he bears some responsibility for what happened in Minamata: Before talking about the responsibility that should be borne by Chisso or the state for Minamata disease, I had taken it upon myself to consider Page 125 →my own sins, my own responsibility for this incident…I am forced to conclude that people bear the sin for Minamata disease and that the fundamental responsibility for this incident lies in the nature of our collective existence…From the perspective of the movement, Chisso is the Other, the enemy, the assailant. For me, this viewpoint evolved until I could recognize “the Chisso within.”64 Ogata also comments that he is uncertain what he would have done had he worked for Chisso: it is easy to censure the corporation, but had he been its employee he might well have participated in destroying Minamata's ecosystems. He calls attention to the ambivalence that pervades human understandings of actual and ideal relationships with both people and environments, ambivalence that in many cases accompanies the massive harm to both. Even more significant, Ogata likens his own (potential) culpability to those of Japanese who supported the emperor system and Germans who supported the Nazis during World War Two: “We can degenerate before we know it. Human beings are weak. It was, after all, the average person who embraced Nazi ideology and worshipped Hitler. Can any of us say with certainty that this would never happen to us? It was the average person who betrayed family members and turned in friends.”65 Moved by his visit to concentration camps in Europe in the mid-1990s, he contrasts Germany's determination to expose its war crimes with Japan's struggle to repress discussion of them, just as the Japanese government has attempted to whitewash the Minamata disaster. Rowing the Eternal Sea here situates in global context even more than does Ishimure's Sea of Suffering the attitudes and behaviors that led to catastrophic and continued damage to Minamata. Disappearing Worlds Worlding local environmental destruction is likewise a hallmark of the Japanese writer Nitta Jir's Tale of Alaska (1974). This gripping novel, published during Japan's boom years of literature on environmental degradation and drawing on considerable research conducted in both Japan and Alaska, is based loosely on the experiences of Frank Yasuda, a Japanese man who dedicated his career to improving the lives of indigenous Alaskans.66 But even as it reveals great chasms between indigenous attitudes toward nature and those of Russian and EuropeanAmerican governments and whalers, Tale of Alaska—more so than Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea, not to mention Sea of Suffering—deeply complicates indigenous perceptions of ideal relationships with environments, particularly with Page 126 →whales. Although some indigenous peoples, including Australian Aborigines, deem whales too sacred to hunt, indigenous Alaskans have a long history both of deep concern for the well-being of these animals and of believing them at their disposal.67 A meteorologist by training, Nitta was at the time of his death one of Japan's most popular writers, known in part for his documentary novels on Japan's natural environments, some of which discuss damage to landscapes while others underline the power of nonhuman phenomena.68 In Tale of Alaska Nitta shifts the focus to the United States and its long and disturbing history of mistreating Asian immigrants, Native Americans, and animals. The

novel depicts Frank Yasuda as moving to the United States in his early twenties. After a difficult year in California, first as a farmhand and then as a low-ranking employee in a cosmetics factory, he joins the crew of the Bear, a vessel that patrols Arctic waters attempting to curtail illegal whaling. When in early December 1893 the Bear becomes stranded on an ice field without sufficient supplies to endure the winter, the ship's captain sends Frank on foot to Point Barrow, approximately 120 miles to the southeast.69 Rescued by two “Eskimo” (esukim) several hours from Barrow by dog sled, Frank develops great respect for the region's indigenous communities; having been subjected to discrimination by white Americans since his arrival in the United States, he decides to stay on in Barrow.70 Unlike many other outsiders who have passed through the area, Frank adapts to local customs, learns the local language, and quickly becomes an important part of the community, even marrying an indigenous woman; the ease with which he learns their ways, including harpooning, combined with his appearance, lead many to believe him an Eskimo from a tribe called “Japan.”71 Frank devotes the next half century to fighting for the survival of indigenous Arctic peoples whose lives have been severely compromised by illegal whaling. First helping them regulate consumption of the chronically insufficient emergency provisions sent by the U.S. government, he then teaches them how to hunt a variety of animals and ultimately establishes a new home for them, the town of Beaver, Alaska, south of the Brooks Range and about 100 miles north of Fairbanks.72 Frank lived in Beaver the rest of his life, with the exception of four years during World War Two, when like many people of Japanese descent in the western United States he was forced to relocate to an internment camp. Along with introducing the customs of indigenous Arctic peoples and exposing the prejudice of Americans of European descent toward both the Japanese and their continent's primordial inhabitants, Tale of Alaska reveals the great environmental crises facing Alaska and the Arctic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The indigenous peoples depend on a steady Page 127 →diet of whales and, particularly after they move inland, other large mammals. But the damage illegal whalers and nonindigenous hunters have inflicted on local ecosystems makes it almost impossible for indigenous peoples to obtain enough food to survive. Nitta's novel most obviously contrasts the attitudes of Frank and indigenous Alaskans toward animals with the attitudes of (other) outsiders: commercial whalers (when Alaska belonged to Russia) and their illegal counterparts (after Alaska became part of the United States) off the state's northern coast and hunters of European descent in the state's interior. Yet as is true of Sea of Suffering, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, and Rowing the Eternal Sea, just as significant in Tale of Alaska is the ambivalence of local peoples themselves toward animals: they are deeply concerned about their well-being but believe they are entitled to take from already imperiled ecosystems what they think they deserve. On the other hand, unlike Minamata residents, the indigenous peoples of Tale of Alaska are depicted not as deeply attached to nature but rather as united in an eternal struggle against it. As the narrator comments: “For these people living under severe nature [kakoku na shizen], their opponent in battle was nature [tatakai no aite wa shizen de atta]. Struggles among people were not unknown. But the indigenous people knew from experience that good relations with one another were more advantageous than fights when confronting magnificent nature [daishizen ni tachimukau].”73 Absent are the peacefully lapping waters with which Ishimure begins Sea of Suffering and even the close relationships between people and whales seen in such novels as the New Zealand Mori writer Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider (1987) and the Native American writer Linda Hogan's People of the Whale (2008).74 Indeed, the ambiguities described in Nitta's novel are more dramatic than those in these other texts, largely because circumstances are more extreme. Although many of the fishers and animals (particularly fish and cats) in Sea of Suffering, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, and Rowing the Eternal Sea suffer from a debilitating and frequently fatal illness, the indigenous peoples and animals (particularly whales and caribou) featured in Tale of Alaska both face eradication. The indigenes relocate not long before they would have starved to death, while the animals are nearly killed off, by both outside and local hunters. As is true of hunter/fisher communities almost everywhere, peoples indigenous to the Arctic are angered at the decimation of the whale population in waters they once had to themselves and in many cases believe are theirs; they decry outsiders’ disrespect of local ecosystems. But the indigenous Alaskans in Tale of Alaska also insist on their own right to hunt whales; they do not think about how they too might be contributing Page 128 →to the devastation of the region's marine mammals. To be sure, as the narrator highlights, the impact of indigenous peoples on animal populations is much slighter than that

of illegal whalers, since the poachers’ steam-powered vessels, with their broader range and more advanced technology, allow them to kill whales more efficiently. Yet it is noteworthy just how intent indigenous peoples are on capturing whales despite the latter's rapidly decreasing numbers; they care about the health of local ecosystems only insofar as these ecosystems continue to provide them with the meat their communities have been eating for centuries. This is almost entirely because, short of uprooting their villages, they appear to have no other choice. Their terrain is the converse of that of Minamata and its environs, where the land is so plentiful and fertile that fishers fortunate enough to own a parcel could abandon fishing in favor of farming. Instead, the indigenous peoples of Tale of Alaska inhabit a forbidding environment of bitter cold and harsh storms, as well as long periods of darkness. They are so well adapted to this environment that acclimatizing to life in what many outsiders would consider the more hospitable interior of the state—where the indigenous community, on the verge of starvation, eventually relocates—is a considerable challenge and results in significant human distress. The interior also is a site of substantial nonhuman suffering. Thanks to the sudden influx of “white people” (hakujin) into Alaska with the gold rush, the caribou stock has been nearly depleted. Surviving caribou have migrated to locales with fewer people, but they continue to be pursued by newcomers of European descent and by indigenous tribes who long have depended on them for survival. Nitta's novel thereby reveals an important paradox surrounding ecodegradation, and more specifically eradication of species. The motivations of newcomers and peoples who have long inhabited a space often differ significantly. In fact, the shared plight of indigenous peoples and the nonhuman is a common theme in indigenous literatures, many of which highlight environmental-justice concerns and even genocide.75 But Tale of Alaska reveals obsession with killing endangered animals as characteristic not only of interlopers seeking quick profits but also of the people who rely on these animals for survival. When and to what extent, if at all, can those most dependent on a species change their own ways of life to forestall its eradication? Tale of Alaska integrates remarks on the damage outsiders have inflicted on Arctic animal populations with discussion of how indigenous peoples depend on these animals for cultural and physical survival. The novel begins with Frank on a 150-mile walk to Point Barrow from the Bear, a police vessel dispatched to catch illegal whalers that has become stranded in an ice field. Page 129 → The narrator comments: The Arctic Ocean once had been a treasure house of whales, a hunting preserve of marine animals. But when Russia controlled Alaska [1733–1867], these animals had been overhunted, almost without restriction, and so their numbers decreased rapidly…[After it bought Alaska] the first thing the United States did was to protect the Arctic's animal resources. Hunting sea animals was prohibited for all but indigenous peoples. In acknowledging the traditional right of the Eskimos, the United States made it possible for them to live.76 Yet despite several decades of American ownership and the creation of protected areas for sea animals, nonhuman populations have not recovered. The narrator continues, “The whales were nearly extinct, a fate they shared with other sea animals,” largely a result of illegal hunting by outsiders whom law enforcement is seemingly powerless to disarm.77 Later in the novel the narrator reveals that the U.S. government did not enact policies to preserve whale populations as rapidly as his earlier comment had suggested. And once these policies were in place, authorities did not devote sufficient resources to enforcing them. The narrator remarks: The fact that whales suddenly had become unattainable, even though the American conscience had led to a sudden switch from an era of overhunting to a policy of protecting whales, was proof that the revival of a whale population that had showed signs of decline could not be stimulated. It was proof that the whale population was decreasing as before. That poachers had fueled this tendency could not

be ignored…[As the only patrol boat] the Bear was powerless.78

All hope seems lost. This is not the first time that indigenous whale hunts have failed; seasons when whales were impossible to find and when many local people starved to death were not unknown to the ancestors of the people Frank befriends. On the other hand, earlier hunts were unsuccessful not because whale populations were devastated but instead because the whales had altered their migration path. Changing weather conditions—including water temperature and ice melting patterns—reconfigured the whales’ route; diverted from the waters near Point Barrow, they temporarily swam beyond the reach of local whaling vessels. Yet the whales always returned to waters accessible to indigenous communities. Circumstances now are very different. Both the narrator Page 130 →and the indigenous peoples themselves speak not of a temporary displacement of whales but instead of their near extinction. Witnessing an interloper's rapid slaughter of several pods of these animals, the Eskimos say one to another, “What terrible things white people are doing! If they go on like this, whales soon will be completely annihilated.”79 The most obvious struggles here are between white hunters and both indigenous peoples and whales. Less apparent but just as significant is the complicated and often contradictory relationship between indigenous peoples and whales, brought into relief by the circumstances surrounding the discourse just cited. The indigenous peoples are horrified at the “white man's” slaughter of whales. But they witness this slaughter not via binoculars from the shore nor from espionage vessels trailing the illegal whalers. Instead, they are themselves out on the sea hunting whales. And, even more ironically, they are precisely the ones who—albeit unintentionally—in this instance make the whales easy targets for poachers: they no sooner round up and encircle the animals than the Sea Wolf appears and poaches them with harpoon guns, slaughtering them all.80 Although unlike in Diane Wilson's An Unreasonable Woman local peoples are not explicitly charged with reducing animal populations, they are in part responsible.81 It is easy to understand the indigenous peoples’ conflicting attitudes toward whales. A decimated whale population threatens existence as they have known it; the narrator goes so far as to bluntly declare: “If they couldn't catch any whales, they would starve.”82 Yet would they, do they really? Tale of Alaska highlights the dire situation facing animal populations in the Arctic and calls attention to the importance of whaling to tribal identity and survival. But while condemning the behaviors of illegal whalers, and actually that of most hunters without deep ties to the places where they hunt, the novel also raises questions about the ability or more accurately willingness of human societies to adapt their lifestyles to changes in nonhuman populations. Nitta's novel portrays indigenous peoples who replace hunting whales with hunting other animals as improving their lives, at times even thriving. The fur trade is lucrative, even though those participating in it must contend with thieves who steal from indigenous communities. More important, although the indigenous people who move from Barrow to Beaver at first have trouble adapting to their new surroundings, they eventually create such comfortable lives for themselves that even when whales return to Barrow, not a single person heads back north; they have come to enjoy the longer days and more moderate weather. Significant as well is that many of the inland indigenous Arctic peoples who came to Beaver to survive also choose to stay there even when the caribou reappear on their Page 131 →ancestral lands. Nonhuman life appears plentiful in Beaver. To be sure, so many beaver pelts are sold here that Frank worries this animal will meet the same fate as animals in Barrow did years before. To take the burden off of the beaver he tries raising mink, but this project fails when hundreds of mink die from an unknown disease. And so he returns to hunting beaver, which seem more than capable of meeting outside and local demands. Tale of Alaska does not explicitly critique the attitudes of indigenous Alaskans toward their environments. Instead, it goes out of its way to condemn the attitudes of “white people” (outsiders) toward these spaces. But Nitta's narrative does reveal important aspects of attitudes toward animals, particularly the outlooks of those most worried about their destruction and most dependent on them for survival. The novel indicates that deploring eradication does not necessarily deter people from believing themselves entitled to act in ways that hasten it; just as important, the novel suggests that sometimes it is compassionate outsiders such as Frank who alone are capable of preventing the obliteration of resident people and their nonhuman prey. Outsiders do so by demonstrating that

ties to a specific site are not unbreakable, that however disruptive to human communities, sometimes the most effective means of dealing with ecologically compromised landscapes is to abandon them, at least until they have time to recover. Tale of Alaska is one of an important subset of Japanese-language creative works that highlight the lives of Japanese residing in the United States. Nitta's novel reveals Frank as discriminated against because of his Japanese heritage, but the narrator focuses more intently on Frank's important contributions to American environments. Ultimately, Tale of Alaska is less concerned with Japanese experiences, even triumphs in the United States, than with environmental crises—the devastation of both people and ecosystems—beyond Japan's shores. The novel alerts Japanese readers to the encompassing damage of landscapes at some spatial and temporal remove from their archipelago. It suggests that the fate of whale populations in the Arctic easily could be duplicated in Japan, where whale futures have long been contentious. Even more significant, the novel's exposés of the environmental ambivalence of peoples indigenous to Alaska warn readers of all nationalities that ensuring the survival of endangered nonhuman species—whether in the United States, Japan, or elsewhere—is more complex than they might imagine. In many cases peoples closest to and most immediately dependent on particular nonhuman entities share with outsiders the perception that environments exist largely for human consumption. Unless countered, this pervasive attitude can lead to destruction of nonhuman populations, even extinction of species. Page 132 → Ishimure's Sea of Suffering, Ogata and iwa's Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea, and Nitta's Tale of Alaska eloquently express the anguish of people witnessing rapid and profound changes to their ecosystems, changes that have been enacted or condoned by more powerful groups—governments, corporations, and more financially solvent and technologically sophisticated societies. These narratives most obviously contrast outsiders’ attitudes toward environments with the attitudes of communities who have deep ties to particular spaces. But these narratives also reveal contradictions within the attitudes of both groups, particularly within the attitudes of the latter: concern with, even deep attachment to a landscape often goes hand in hand with the assumption that one has special claims to it—the belief that one is justified in using it for one's own benefit. Such contradictions paradoxically undermine distinctions between the attitudes of outsiders and those of local farmers, fishers, whalers, and hunters, even when these two groups have very different immediate effects on environments. This environmental ambivalence reveals some beliefs, emotions, and perceptions concerning the natural world as readily shared, for the most part unconsciously, by otherwise seemingly very different groups. The implications, albeit often unstated, are profound: the task of discerning human attitudes toward the nonhuman is in some ways simplified at the same time that recognizing alternatives to such attitudes—or even the possibility of alternatives—is made infinitely more difficult.

Protesting Protection Ishimure's Sea of Suffering, Nitta's The Tale of Alaska, and Ogata and iwa's Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and especially Rowing the Eternal Sea are concerned with events of substantial spatial and temporal reach. The scopes of the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima's “The Last Hunter” (1987) and the Taiwanese nativist writer Huang Chunming's “Fang-sheng” (Set Free, 1987) are more implicit; these texts focus on the plights of particular landscapes, but the incidents they describe are not unique to these spaces, nor is the environmental ambivalence they reveal. Like the narratives examined above, “The Last Hunter” and “Set Free,” published the year Taiwan lifted martial law and just as Taiwanese environmental consciousness was beginning to burgeon, both depict indigenous/local farmers, fishers, and hunters fighting for their livelihoods amid governmentenabled ecological degradation. Yet different in both cases is the recent, official transformation of devastated lands into conservation areas with strict limits on use. Characters Page 133 →in “The Last Hunter” and “Set Free” are for the most part spared listening to denials that ecosystems have been damaged and official decrees that merely delay environmental injury. Significantly, however, they are far from relieved that the government is trying to remediate the ecodegradation for which it is at least partly responsible. Instead, they protest the new conservation laws and actively defy them. As was true in the United States in the wake of the 2010 British Petroleum disaster, when Louisiana residents were outraged at the Obama administration's temporary ban on

deepwater oil and gas drilling, in these Taiwanese stories the same individuals condemn both the degradation and the conservation of a single space.83 Environmental ambivalence is magnified, both between and within groups and individuals. Much of the opposition to government conservation policies in “The Last Hunter,” “Set Free,” and similar narratives stems from an inversion of the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) phenomenon: people decry lifestyle changes mandated in the name of ecological recovery. These texts depict those who long for healthy environments as loath to alter their own lives in ways that will facilitate the project and in fact as advocating behaviors that almost certainly will further harm ecosystems. Topas Tamapima's and Huang Chunming's protagonists express deep attachment to particular landscapes, but they also believe it their prerogative to use these spaces for their own benefit, regardless of the ecological consequences. The Taiwanese stories focus on damage to local landscapes, but their environmental possibility is vast; the devastation they describe and people's responses to this devastation are duplicated in sites the world over. A member of the Bunun, based in central Taiwan and one of the island's largest aboriginal tribes, Topas Tamapima is both a celebrated writer and a physician. Although outsiders (Japanese, Han Chinese, nonindigenous Taiwanese) have been writing extensively about indigenous Taiwanese since the Japanese occupation, Topas Tamapima is part of the first group of indigenous Taiwanese writers who write in Chinese. Many of his essays and short stories, including “The Last Hunter” and “Xiyang chan” (Sunset Cicadas, 1987), describe the challenges faced by Taiwan's aboriginal peoples.84 “The Last Hunter”—published in the early days of the indigenous rights movement and part of the first blossoming of Taiwanese indigenous literature— narrates the experiences of Biyari (Chn. Quan Guosheng), a Bunun hunter from the Renlun settlement. Feeling confined at home, his relationship with his wife Pasula tense because of her recent miscarriage and their continuing infertility, he takes off one morning for several days of sport hunting in the mountains. Target animals are difficult to find in the depleted highland forests, circumstances Biyari attributes to the insensitivity of Taiwan's government Page 134 →employees toward the marvels of the wilderness: a decade earlier, when it sold farm and forest land to lumber companies, Taiwan's Forestry Bureau had cleared all the valuable timber and then set fire to a tremendous expanse of forest; what remains likely will be transformed into a park for wealthy urbanites. Biyari eventually bags an already deceased trapped fox as well as a muntjac (a type of deer), which he shoots and then retrieves with the help of his loyal dog Yifan. While exiting the forest he is stopped by a policeman who chastises him and his fellow tribespeople for breaking long-standing laws banning guns and hunting. The officer confiscates the freshly killed muntjac and sends Biyari on his way, encouraging him to abandon hunting and find a new career. The chances of Biyari heeding this advice are slim, so reluctant is he to change his lifestyle despite the numerous physical and economic hardships it entails, not to mention its potential effects on already compromised surroundings. Unlike many members of his tribe he refuses to work in the flatlands, even though so doing would allow him a more comfortable existence.85 The narrator of “The Last Hunter” leaves little question as to the personal slights and linguistic indignities foisted on Taiwan's tribal peoples by bureaucratic officials, a result of the Nationalist government's assimilation policy, launched in the early 1950s, that eroded indigenous languages and cultures and effectively designated indigenous peoples second-class citizens.86 The policeman who stops Biyari immediately assumes he is up to no good, shouting out to him: “Hey, savage [fanzi], what are you looking at? What are you doing? Are you a hunter or an arsonist?” The officer is of course correct in assuming that Biyari is not in the forest simply to pick flowers and relax, as Biyari claims is the case. On the other hand, there is little about him to suggest he is an arsonist, much less a savage. When Biyari fearfully responds, the seemingly uncomprehending officer, rather than asking him to speak more clearly, takes this opportunity to criticize his Chinese language skills: “What did you say? Your Chinese is terrible [Ni de guoyu taicha le].” Likewise, when asked for his name, Biyari responds “Biyari,” to which the officer counters, “I’m warning you, don't play games with me. Give me your Chinese name [guoyu mingzi].”87 Here “The Last Hunter” draws attention to the linguistic displacement of indigenous Taiwanese, who have had little choice but to become proficient in guoyu (lit. language of the country) and even adopt guoyu mingzi (lit. names in the language of the country). Significant as well in this regard is not only that “The Last Hunter”—unlike some texts by Taiwanese aboriginal writers—is written in relatively graceful Mandarin but also

that nearly all of Biyari's utterances are as well, except for a curse he hurls at the policeman at the end of the story, which a footnote Page 135 →explains is from the Bunun language.88 Replicating the perceptions of many indigenous writers, the narrative underlines how thoroughly aboriginal peoples have been deprived of both physical and cultural spaces.89 Reinforcing the impression of people mercilessly displaced and stereotyped, the officer later asserts: “You mountain people are inherently ruthless and difficult to change. The government has arranged it so that you don't have cares or concerns and can escape outside aggression. But you're gluttonous and lazy.”90 Not surprisingly, the indigenous Taiwanese also harbor prejudices against outsiders, including tribespeople who have left the mountains to work for the government. At one point Biyari thinks to himself that it would be pleasant to split a bottle of wine with his friend Luka, “sing tales about the forest, and talk about the repugnant people living at the foot of the mountain, curse those brown-skinned government employees, their spines so changeable.”91 He does not state explicitly that these employees are indigenous collaborators. But referring to them as easily manipulated and as “brown-skinned,” when taken in the context of his later comment that the lightness of the skin of the policeman at the checkpoint precludes his being (indigenous) Taiwanese, suggests that they are from tribal communities. In the end, however, the narrator of “The Last Hunter” does not devote as much space to these prejudices as to those against tribal peoples. “The Last Hunter” exposes the disrespect employees of Taiwan's government show toward indigenous Taiwanese and, to a lesser extent, the reverse. The attitudes of both groups toward Taiwan's ecosystems are not as clear. Indigenous peoples and government employees, criticizing each other's behaviors and particularly attitudes vis-àvis the nonhuman, both believe themselves better stewards of the island's environmental health. Yet calling attention to inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies among behaviors, and, most significant, inconsistencies among attitudes both between and within these two groups and their individual members, Topas Tamapima's story reveals the fallacies of such self-flattering assertions. “The Last Hunter” depicts tribespeople, especially Biyari, as experiencing deeper emotional and physical connections with environments than do employees of Taiwan's government. But these connections do not result in significantly different perceptions of ideal relationships with the nonhuman, much less in heightened perceptions of the (potential) changes these behaviors inflict on these environments; Biyari believes he should be allowed to use landscapes to fulfill his personal desires, even when this means hunting the forest's most endangered animals.92 In fact, early in “The Last Hunter” the narrator describes perceptions about environmental degradation as easily distorted, rendering the gap between Page 136 →attitudes and actualities at times quite substantial. Verbalizing the sounds and sights of Biyari's village shortly before sunrise, the narrator contrasts the behaviors of animals with those of people: roosters crow and dogs bark, while men chop wood and houses belch gas: “A small number of households had already ignited their firewood, and their chimneys disgorged black smoke. In this place there had never been anyone who thought that the black smoke would create air pollution. This was because the tribal people believed that the black smoke would rise to the heavens with the clouds.”93 The villagers have no idea that something so ingrained in their daily lives as their heating and cooking fires could be poisoning the air. Topas Tamapima's narrator does not divulge his own perception of the smoke, but by inserting the term “air pollution” (kongqi wuran) he suggests that he, or at least out-side observers, might categorize the smoke in this way. This ambiguity opens the possibility that villagers’ other perceptions of their relationships with environments are also somewhat misguided. “The Last Hunter” confirms that some of the deepest conflicts in attitudes concerning the nonhuman exist not between Taiwanese tribespeople and the island's government employees, as Biyari believes, but rather within the tribespeople themselves. Biyari thinks of the forest as his refuge, as a place to be comforted and consoled: “It would be fantastic if women were like the forest—secluded and gorgeous. From inside the forest, from outside the forest, and especially looking down from high places, the beauty of the forest is a harmonious green unity [lüse hexie de zuhe], like the world of the Garden of Eden.”94 Biyari believes himself part of this heavenly, ultimately imagined space and concludes that such feelings are foreign to government employees. Frustrated that after a morning in the mountains the only animal he has encountered is a dead fox caught in a trap, he worries about the future of the forest. He fears that within several years this treescape will be filled with “the sounds of people and the sounds of

vehicles,” that because of the wounds sure to be inflicted on the land by developers, “all traces of its animals will be destroyed and hunters will disappear from tribes.” To forestall this seeming inevitability, Biyari believes that wealthy government employees should be “brought to the mountain to probe the forest's secrets.” He argues that they should be induced to Listen by themselves to the sounds of birds, wind, wild animals, and falling leaves in the woods; then walk into the valleys and look at the magnificent cliffs; take off their shoes and wet their feet in the pure spring water; admire fish that are gracefully swimming, not yet “enjoying” human waste and simply having no fear of people. The government Page 137 →employees would be awakened to the enigmatic forest, and just like criminals in jail about to be sentenced they would regret their initial lack of insight…Biyari tried hard to open his eyes, but the tranquility of the forest, the warm sunshine, and the soporific shade joined together and steadily engulfed him. In the end he was hypnotized by the magic of the forest.95 First these outsiders are simply to listen, to absorb the (ordinary) sounds of plants, animals, and wind. Then, slowly succumbing to the forest's allure like Masahiko in Ishimure Michiko's Tenko (Lake of Heaven, 1997), examined in Chapter 3, they are to look at the “magnificent” (xiongwei) cliffs and “grace-ful” (youmei) fish and feel the “pure” (chunjing) spring water. Modifiers, absent in the first part of the passage cited above, gradually become stronger. Having experienced the wonders of the landscape, government employees will awaken to the “enigmatic” (miban) forest and recognize the errors of their ways. But what rouses outsiders hypnotizes Biyari; what impresses them engulfs him; what is enigmatic to them is magic (mofa) to him. Here and elsewhere “The Last Hunter” portrays Biyari and other tribespeople as capable of having deeper emotional and physical connections with the nonhuman world than government officials. In fact, the older tribal hunters believe the Forestry Bureau responsible for setting the fire that a decade before had devastated one of the region's forests; the younger hunters cannot believe the bureau could have acted so foolishly, but they are certain their parents and grandparents are without blame; tribal peoples, unlike bureau employees, “knew that life in the forest accounted for half of life on earth, most of which was closely bound up with the hunters.”96 These intimate interactions are multifaceted: the landscape can hypnotize, but it also can prove a difficult companion; interspersed with references to the beauties of the natural world are those to the difficulties of living within it. “The Last Hunter” begins with Biyari struggling to chop enough wood to allow his wife Pasula to keep the fire burning in their stove. Frustrated at his slow progress, and growing steadily colder, she remonstrates with him for refusing to work as a temporary packer in the flatlands; she reminds him that had he taken this job the family would have had enough money to buy warm clothing, and they would have been able to stave off the chill that now penetrates their home. Storms brew outside, where the clouds are “growing thicker and rolling savagely down the mountain, just like an avalanche.” Fearful of falling into a ditch, Biyari follows closely behind his dog. And after returning home later that evening, thoughts of “avalanches and icy air” keep him awake.97 But Biyari soon realizes that it is in precisely this weather that Page 138 →animals come down from the mountain, their movement following that of the clouds. And so, feeling suffocated at home, he decides that the next day he will go hunting. The surrounding forest remains a refuge, from domestic life if nothing else; as Biyari remarks soon after arriving in the woods, echoing the sentiments of Minamata residents deprived of virtually everything they have held dear, “If one day I get disgusted with that woman, well, I still have the forest.”98 Of course, this space is not without its perils. The narrator notes that had a bear stumbled across Biyari while the latter was hypnotized by the magic of the woods he would have awakened inside the animal. Yet with people actively hunting wildlife, this treescape also becomes a potential site of nonhuman slaughter. In the minds of Biyari and the few remaining tribal hunters, appropriate interactions with environments involve not just soaking up their splendor, as Biyari wishes government officials would take the time to do, and enduring their unpredictability, as most people living in the tribal village must do as a matter of course. Sanctioned interactions also include killing animals for reasons other than survival. To be sure, after some delay Biyari successfully bags a muntjac. But “The Last Hunter” focuses less on the contradictions between his attitudes and his behaviors (believing himself close to animals yet taking their lives) than on his ambivalent attitudes. Biyari wishes that government officials would open themselves to the sights and sounds of the forests, that they would think about

more than the “thickness of timber.” Ironically, however, these same officials are the ones enforcing gun control laws and hunting bans in areas of diminished animal populations, demonstrating at least superficial concern for the forest's future. Biyari's own attitudes differ greatly from those of the officials, but not solely in the ways the reader might expect. Believing it his right to hunt even in areas that have explicitly been decreed off limits, and more important, in areas where some fauna clearly have been thinned, Biyari flouts restrictions. He doggedly pursues an animal to bring home to his wife to help him reestablish his honor.99 In fact, the passages surrounding Biyari's paean to the forest reveal a man intent on finding great joy in displacing some of its last living animals, not to sustain tribal ways of life but instead to repair his relationship with his spouse.100 The narrator indicates that Biyari enters “primeval forest” that he uses as his personal hunting ground “determined to capture a wild boar or muntjac to make [Pasula] happy.”101 Likewise, not long after waking from the slumber induced by the forest's warmth, shade, and tranquility, he spots a large goat that darts away almost immediately. He sends his dog Yifan after it, and when the dog fails to deliver, Biyari becomes even more determined to capture an animal, any animal: “What a shame. Pasula enjoys eating goats’ Page 139 →small intestines. I really have to bag something before dusk, otherwise when I return home Pasula won't give me her love, and Luka [another tribal hunter] might be waiting for me on the road, wanting to make fun of me.”102 After successfully capturing a muntjac, Biyari indicates that its meat will help his wife regain some of the strength she lost after her recent miscarriage. But his thrill at the kill results less from nourishing than from impressing his spouse: “He was very pleased with having captured something so large. He stuffed the animal into his knapsack and then sang a song celebrating the muntjac hunt as he hopped and skipped to the cave…[After cleaning up] he set out for home, relaxed and happy.”103 The policeman who detains Biyari asks why he came to the mountains to hunt, since meat is readily available at lower elevations. Biyari does not pretend to be unaware of this, nor does he plead physical desperation. Instead, he responds directly: “I’m not a glutton. My wife and I had a fight. She looks down on me and laughs because I can't find work. So I suddenly hankered after the forest.”104 That Biyari is proud of killing one of the few larger remaining animals in the devastated forest, when surrounding spaces are experiencing no apparent shortage, highlights his anthropocentrism, indeed selfishness. Biyari is genuinely concerned that the “sounds of people” and “sounds of cars” will fill the forests, displacing hunters and animals. His anxieties in some ways echo those of early national parks planners in the United States and around the world: protected lands need continued public support, something difficult to sustain if the public is denied access, but increased public access, and the greater automobile traffic that makes it possible, also threaten nonhuman life in these spaces.105 Yet in certain respects Biyari misses the point. Despite the relative absence of cars and people, hunters and animals already have been displaced. To be sure, the narrator of “The Last Hunter” does not assign explicit responsibility for the meager animal population in the forest where Biyari hunts. Although tribe members blame the state for having destroyed landscapes, the story portrays Taiwan's government officials as having become watchful guardians of the forests, protecting them not from outsiders and their cars but instead from tribal hunters. The story concludes with the policeman encouraging Biyari to “Turn over a new leaf. Don't call yourself a hunter anymore,” but Biyari silently vows to return, even without a rifle.106 So Biyari himself risks becoming, or at least more closely resembling, one of the people he fears. He attempts to separate himself from the clamorous nonindigenous Taiwanese and their automobiles. In many ways he is justified in doing so. But the real difference between these visitors and hunters, at least as depicted in “The Last Hunter,” lies not in fundamental attitudes toward the landscape. Biyari's overwhelming concern, despite his clear affection for Page 140 →his hunting dog, is not protecting the forest's animals; he worries about the future of the forest only insofar as it is a space of personal rejuvenation and empowerment, both of which for him involve taking nonhuman life. “The Last Hunter” addresses some common ambiguities of relationships among people and environments. Most important, it explores the ecoambivalence, often unconscious, of those who seem to have the strongest affective ties with nature. Much writing on indigenous populations, both creative and critical, highlights their deep reverence for nature and contrasts these attitudes with those of the populations that have commandeered indigenous territory.107 “The Last Hunter” problematizes such assumptions, proposing that to indigenous peoples being part of a landscape means killing animals that live in that space, even when they are scarce and their meat is

not needed for survival. Genuine appreciation for environments is not an impediment but an enabler to believing oneself justified in taking life from already seriously destabilized ecosystems. Without question, Topas Tamapima's story signals the many difficulties facing indigenous communities in Taiwan, whose lives have themselves been altered significantly by government officials intent on weakening tribal identities. But the narrative also reveals that interactions on the island among people and environments are far more complex than the intergroup dichotomies through which tribal peoples and government officials attempt to make sense of each other's motives.108 As with “The Last Hunter,” the contemporary Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming's short story “Set Free” includes characters who simultaneously long for diverse, prosperous, and aesthetically pleasing environments; advocate behaviors that directly harm landscapes; and denounce policies that would ameliorate existing damage to ecosystems and prevent further occurrences. The protagonists of both texts, although great advocates for the natural world, are angry at government regulations prohibiting the taking of non-human life. But “Set Free” intensifies the environmental ambivalence of “The Last Hunter.” Huang Chunming's story features a couple who have a strong affinity for the natural world and have spent years fighting against industrial pollution, yet are deeply disturbed by new government rules guaranteed to enable birds to flourish in their backyard. Topas Tamapima's character Biyari kills one of the forest's few remaining desired animals, but he never speaks explicitly of doing so (he talks only of hunting, not of hunting endangered animals). Biyari makes it clear that he would have been delighted had there been more prey. In contrast, Granny Jinzu and her husband Zhuang Awei, the protagonists of “Set Free,” speak directly of their fear that birds will destroy their fields now that the government has designated their coastal area a Page 141 →bird sanctuary; they believe that the combination of an increased bird population and prohibitions against catching the animals will bankrupt the family. Further intensifying the environmental ambivalence of “Set Free” is the greater severity and visibility of the ecodegradation: while Biyari and his fellow villagers are not even aware that the smoke emanating from their homes pollutes the air, there is no escaping the encompassing pollution described in “Set Free.” In addition, the Zhuang family spent many years publicly protesting the pollution emitted by neighboring factories, pollution that virtually eliminated area bird populations; Jinzu and Awei's son also participated in these protests and was jailed for his activism. Widely recognized as Taiwan's representative nativist writer, even nativist “cultural hero,” Huang Chunming set his story in the small town of Dakenggu, located at the mouth of the Wulaokeng River in northeast Taiwan.109 The terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric environs of Dakenggu have been damaged by the increasing emissions, both wastewater and airborne contaminants, of nearby chemical plants and cement factories. The town's human residents also suffer economically and physically; pollution prevents them from growing crops and catching fish, many persons have become ill, and some have died. Having been partly responsible for bringing chemical plants and cement factories to town and then having fought unsuccessfully to have the polluters removed, the human residents of Dakenggu, especially Jinzu and Awei, are resigned to a degraded environment. But to the couple's surprise, after years of showing little concern for anything but corporate profits, the authorities announce plans to transform the coastal area, including Jinzu and Awei's fields, into a bird refuge; to entice and protect different species of birds, factories soon will be prohibited from dumping their toxic waste in the water, and people will not be allowed to catch birds, even crop predators that are certain to revive in the absence of pollution. Although their friend Tianying repeatedly calls this development “good news” (hao xiaoxi), Jinzu and Awei do not share his enthusiasm. A flourishing and untouchable bird population will almost certainly inhibit agricultural output, resulting in a harvest that is no less meager than when the area was plagued by pollution. The couple resent having their own fields, their own backyard, transformed into a space that ironically represents everything for which they fought. From the opening pages, the narrator of “Set Free” spotlights the severe pollution plaguing Dakenggu and the harm it inflicts on plants, animals, and people. The story begins on laundry day. Jinzu hurries to bring in her wash before it is drenched by a rapidly approaching thunderstorm and finds it covered with soot emitted from local factories. The narrator reveals that this pollution, severe enough to have disfigured a statue at the local temple, has been Page 142 →a menace for more than a decade. He claims: “It was something the people of Dakenggu couldn't do anything about. But over time, the women had already figured out how to rid their laundry drying outside of

the smoky dust.”110 They beat it out of their bedding and clothing, letting the soot fall to the ground. Of course, where no clothing or other objects break its fall, the dirt tumbles directly from the sky to the earth. As the narrator observes several pages later, “For years the people of Dakenggu had cursed the chimneys [of the chemical plants and cement factories], but [those were nothing more than helpless responses]…Bamboo, magnolia, daylilies, and knotgrass—there wasn't a single upward-facing flower petal or leaf that wasn't covered with a layer of soot.”111 While soot enshrouds plants, pollution leaches life out of water. When Jinzu's husband returns from the river not with the brimming pail of loaches he had hoped to find but instead with a “load of shit,” she exclaims: “I've been thinking that since the factories opened, there haven't been any loaches, snails, spotted groupers, turtles, or clams at Dakenggu. All the life in the water has disappeared.”112 Ironically, the only water capable of sustaining life is the water that local people control; individuals who sell loaches, like those who sell eels and shrimp, now must raise these animals themselves in protected spaces. Huang Chunming's story also highlights the politics of environmental degradation: although “Set Free” takes place during the days leading up to the release of Jinzu and Awei's son Zhuang Wentong from prison for protesting the increasingly severe pollution of his town, the narrator's reminiscences together with conversations between Jinzu and her husband reveal that twenty years before, in elections for township head, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, KMT) had backed a candidate who assured voters that if he were selected he would bring factories to the impoverished area. People believed this would improve their economic prospects, so they elected him. But the new industries not only failed to provide employment and economic security for very many villagers, they also polluted the region. People, plants, and animals all died: Yang was elected township head. With Nationalist support and great speed, he handed the land—publicly prepared by the township government—over to businessmen at a deeply discounted price. Factories were built. And their chimneys, which at first made the villagers feel as though they had entered the modern world, day and night belched out thick black smoke that spread for five or six kilometers. Several years later the farmers finally discovered the undeniable relationship between the soot and the stunted, withered shoots and seedlings in their Page 143 →fields. At the same time, they discovered an unpleasant odor permeating the water in their streams and wells. They weren't as concerned with the failure of local youths to find employment in the factories as with the increasing severity of pollution-related problems.113 Back then, people were more concerned with the environment than with employment, the former having an even greater impact on their lives than the latter. Some protested, but their voices were quickly quelled. Eight years later a candidate promising to remove the factories ran for office; not surprisingly, he won in a landslide. But unlike his predecessor, he did not keep his promises: not only were the existing factories not removed, but additional ones were built, destroying farmland and polluting the sky and waters even more severely: The more than 200 families in Dakenggu had always made their living by catching fry in the port [and doing a bit of farming]…But after the factories upstream began dumping wastewater in the river, the fry died of the poison…And if the disappearance of fry weren't enough, the putrid black water sporadically released by the factories every fourth or fifth day did terrible things to anyone with an open wound who came into contact with it.114 People continued to protest, some arguing that water samples were tampered with to conceal the extent of the pollution. But dissenters were quickly silenced, and some, like Wentong, were jailed. And additional factories sprouted up: “After Wentong was imprisoned…several more factories were built around there, polluting the sky with thick smoke and fouling the waters.”115 Huang Chunming's story describes one couple's struggle against unrelenting assaults on their village and their way of life, which is tied directly to the health of the surrounding water, soil, and air. To be sure, “Set Free” posits the villagers as immediately responsible for this state of affairs; the KMT candidate's rhetoric on profits via industrializing was more appealing even than the independent candidate's talk of “‘democracy’ [minzhu], ‘freedom’ [ziyou], ‘equality’ [pingdeng], [and] ‘human rights’ [renquan].”116 But Huang Chunming's text also

highlights their concerted albeit long and unsuccessful attempts to restore their surroundings. For the most part, families like the Zhuangs, not to mention local ecosystems, are portrayed as at the mercy of seemingly indomitable, unstoppable, and destructive government and industry. Yet the human/nonhuman contacts cited in “Set Free” in fact are more Page 144 →complex. Several phenomena make it impossible to establish clean divisions between heartless and destructive polluters on the one hand and ecologically minded townspeople on the other. One is Awei's long-standing obsession with catching an egret, the text's principal subplot and a concern from beginning to end; an excellent example of disjunctures between beliefs and behaviors, Awei's fascination with this animal is discussed in Chapter 7. Just as illuminating, but more textually concentrated, are Jinzu and Awei's responses to Tianying's report on the government's agenda for the region. Tianying first announces that the authorities are planning to turn the coastal area, including their fields, into a “protected area for birds” (quanbu guiru niaolei baohuqu). When Awei asks what this means, Tianying clarifies that people will not be permitted to catch the teals, goldfinches, and swans that migrate to the coast in winter. Awei seems relieved that his life will not be disrupted. Reminding Tianying that ever since polluters came to town, there have been few birds to catch, he apparently is not troubled by the idea of a bird sanctuary without birds. But Tianying quickly disabuses him of this scenario, telling him, “After the bird sanctuary is established, the factories will be prohibited from discharging toxic water.” Tianying does not need to state the obvious corollary: paradoxically, an absence of poison, something for which Awei and his neighbors fought for years, will result in an influx of birds, which to Awei is intolerable. He and Jinzu are troubled by the news that they will not be allowed to snare even the birds eating their crops. Tianying and Awei both believe that in their town “a bird [now] is more valuable than a person.” Tianying is not particularly disturbed by this recent development, declaring, “Who cares if we can't catch sparrows? The factories no longer will be discharging toxic water. Isn't this a good thing?” Awei and his wife disagree, the narrator noting, “This comment not only did not console them. It instead brought to mind the fact that Wentong had been jailed for several years precisely because the factories had been discharging toxic waste.”117 Industrial emissions and the government's resistance to tempering them have brought undue suffering to the Zhuangs and their town. Yet the news that these emissions will be cut brings not joy but fear. “Set Free” suggests that Awei and Jinzu believe the government has done nothing more than swing from one extreme to another: where corporations once could disturb and even destroy environments without repercussion, now farmers cannot touch individual animals. Since they soon will not be allowed to do anything about the birds consuming their crops, their livelihoods appear threatened. This storyline is dropped as quickly as it is introduced. Recognizing that he has overstayed his welcome, Tianying wanders off, and the spotlight returns to Awei and Jinzu's concerns about when their son will be freed. “Set Page 145 →Free” concludes not long thereafter, with Awei liberating his egret and Wentong, newly released from prison, at last returning home. But the couple's immediate reaction to news of the impending conversion of their environs from lifeless cesspool to bird sanctuary highlights their environmental ambivalence. On the one hand, the Zhuangs desire an ecosystem amenable to birds—not only will catching birds increase the family's monthly income, but also the soil of an ecosystem hospitable to birds will almost surely be amenable to crops, the sale of which sustains the family. But if the family is prohibited from removing birds from their fields, their crops most likely will be destroyed, and they will go bankrupt. In short, what they desire is not so much freedom from pollution as one of the freedoms that pollution curtails, that is to say, freedom to use the nonhuman world to their personal advantage. “Set Free” makes clear the environmental ambivalence preservation can provoke.118 Topas Tamapima's “The Last Hunter” and Huang Chunming's “Set Free” expose conservation as potentially just as controversial as degradation: anger at the destruction of ecosystems is accompanied by anger at subsequent restrictions on using them. Such conflicts in attitudes reveal concern for nonhuman health as tied almost inextricably to concern for human well-being; they show rejuvenating ecosystems as being welcomed only when so doing contributes to or at least does not obstruct the physical, financial, or emotional rejuvenation of human life. Whether exhibited by people and communities with close ties to these ecosystems or by groups responsible for significantly changing (degrading or restoring) them, these attitudinal conflicts often are readily understandable. But they are seldom acknowledged or analyzed—characters, narrators, and critics reveal their own ambivalence about ecoambivalence.

Narratives concerned with ecodegradation as well as discourse on these narratives frequently villainize industry and governments for damaging and condoning damage to environments, pitting corporate and national interests against the well-being of relatively defenseless people and ecosystems. Likewise, such texts and discourse on them frequently draw attention to the deep respect of local peoples for the nonhuman entities populating their compromised landscapes. These narratives and their interpretive reconfigurations highlight local people's emotional attachment to the nonhuman. But so doing frequently obscures people's assumptions of entitlement to the natural world. Such beliefs need not entail conscious intent or readiness to inflict harm, but they are not necessarily divorced from the willingness or ability to do so. At times arguments for taking the lives of endangered animals are based on the actuality or at least the perception that people need to do so to survive. Yet Page 146 →the creative works examined in this chapter suggest that even those conditions that seem the most uncompromising—such as the plight of indigenous Alaskans described in Nitta's Tale of Alaska—often are not without alternatives. Most situations include some measure of maneuverability. On the other hand, the absolute dependence of people on the nonhuman for survival makes virtually inevitable their belief that they are entitled to manipulate ecosystems, wherever they might be.

Navigating Disparate Attitudes Many texts on environmental degradation highlight how easily people destroy environments with which they do not have long-standing ties; ecosystems often are depicted as at the mercy of relative outsiders. But some creative works accentuate the ambivalent attitudes toward the nonhuman not of indigenous or local peoples—as do Ishimure's Sea of Suffering, Ogata and iwa's Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea, Nitta's Tale of Alaska, Topas Tamapima's “The Last Hunter,” and Huang Chunming's “Set Free”—but instead of newcomers to a region. Such works include the Chinese writer A Cheng's novella King of Trees (1985), which takes place during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and reveals the conflicting attitudes toward trees and landscapes more generally of young men under orders to mutilate unfamiliar yet awe-inspiring ecosystems that authorities have condemned as “old” and “useless.” This novella demonstrates how readily, and without explanation, awe can become indifference, only to be transformed into terror at what has been done in the name of indifference. Narrated by a young man who does not recognize this contradiction within either himself or others, King of Trees underscores the difficulties of acknowledging, much less addressing, what enables large-scale environmental destruction. The novella is based on A Cheng's own experiences during the Cultural Revolution in the Xishuangbanna, a Daizu Autonomous Region bordering Laos and Burma and one of China's most diverse biological sanctuaries. Son of the film critic Zhong Dianfei, A Cheng was born and raised in Beijing, where he attended one of the city's most prestigious secondary schools; he returned to Beijing after the Cultural Revolution, gained prominence in the 1980s as a writer of roots-seeking literature (xungen wenxue), and emigrated to the United States in 1986. Most notable about his work is how it eschews both the self-pity of scar literature and the idealistic images of Page 147 →pastoral writers. Instead, many of his texts use traditional storytelling techniques to depict rural China.119 King of Trees is one of many Chinese writings on being sent down to the countryside (xiaxiang) during the Cultural Revolution. Campaigns to dispatch China's youths to rural areas occurred well before the mid-1960s.120 But what had been relatively voluntary became mandatory, and eventually 20 million urbanites were torn away from their families. Some were sent to rural villages to join production teams and establish residence (chadui luohu). These individuals did not significantly change environments. Others were sent to the frontier regions of China, everywhere from the tropical forests of Hainan Island and Yunnan to the deserts and forests of Xinjiang and the steppes of Inner Mongolia and Gansu, where they “opened waste-land,” ultimately claiming more than three million acres for agriculture. Not surprisingly, their impact on ecosystems was tremendous; some reclamation did create arable land, but in many cases it destroyed terrain. Wetlands were obliterated and hillsides deforested, while animal populations plummeted. A Cheng was one of approximately 200,000 educated youth sent to the Xi-shuangbanna, whose rain forests contained species thought to date back millions of years. There, educated youths felled more than 600,000 acres, changing even the region's climate.121 A harsh critique of the Cultural Revolution, A Cheng's King of Trees gives insight into the struggles of those sent

to transform landscapes far from home and explores their complicated relationships with their new surroundings. As several critics have noted, this novella uses the environment neither as setting for the cultural imaginary nor as “metaphorical vehicle for a meditation on human culture and history.”122 Instead, one of the principal priorities of the text is highlighting the rampant mutilation of ecosystems that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. In so doing, the novella touches on numerous attitudinal conflicts vis-à-vis the nonhuman. The clearest contradictions are those between Li Li and Xiao Geda (Knotty Xiao). Li Li is an educated youth and enthusiastic revolutionary who has been dispatched to the mountains, while Xiao Geda is part of a production team that has been working for nearly a decade in the area where Li Li is sent. The principal task of the newly arrived workers is to help replace trees condemned as useless with “useful trees” (youyong de shu). King of Trees here inverts Zhuangzi's parable of the tree, where “useless” trees are spared precisely because of their uselessness.123 Li Li believes that existing vegetation, as an “old thing,” like the actual four olds (sijiu; old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking, the destruction of which was one of the stated goals of the Cultural Revolution), Page 148 →must be removed at all costs. His behaviors match his attitudes, and he quickly proves himself the group's most dedicated logger. In contrast, Knotty Xiao, already uncomfortable with the continuing destruction of trees and undergrowth on the mountains, is deeply disturbed by Li Li's determination to cut down even Shu Wang (King of Trees). The King of Trees is the region's largest and most impressive, one that Knotty Xiao and many locals believe sacred; the death of this tree at the hands of Li Li and his friends is followed quickly by Knotty Xiao's own, so pained is he by its demise.124 The attitudes of the first-person narrator fall between those of Li Li and those of Knotty Xiao. Like Li Li, the narrator is an educated urban youth. But unlike Li Li he appreciates, indeed stands in awe of the rural landscape. On the other hand, he delights in participating in its destruction. Despite his initial fascination with this mountainous region, it takes felling the King of Trees and spatially pervasive damage—transforming mountains into raging infernos—for the narrator to become uncomfortable with human alteration of ecosystems. More subtle yet more significant than the differences between Li Li's and Knotty Xiao's attitudes toward the landscape is the narrator's own environmental ambiguity: he is awestruck by his surroundings but nonchalant about the annihilation of some of its largest flora. In addition, he helps destroy some of the very bodies that captivate him. The narrator's environmental conflict is shared by most of the other young men. His frequent use of the terms “educated youth” and “everyone” (dajia) when describing the students’ perceptions of the mountains and forests indicates that many of them, perhaps everyone except Li Li and his innermost circle, are moved deeply by the natural world. This they share with their counterparts in other fiction on the experiences of young people sent to China's rural areas during the Cultural Revolution, including the young men in Ma Bo's novel Xuese huang-hun (Blood Red Sunset, 1988). Yet the youths all participate in destroying the forests, some even joyfully. Only when the King of Trees is felled and the mountains are burned do they have second thoughts. One of the great paradoxes of this novella lies in the students’ and particularly the narrator's attitudinal conflicts; these are less easily explained than the contradictions between their attitudes and their actions, which result directly from the perils facing educated Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, including the fact that they will be severely punished if they do not clear the land as ordered. In contrast, nothing prevents the narrator from being troubled by deforestation and voicing internal outrage about the loss of so much vegetation. The narrator does not address the contradictions in his or the other young men's attitudes, nor does he even appear to be aware of Page 149 →them. King of Trees demonstrates how easily appreciation and reverence of ecosystems can be accompanied by indifference to them or even satisfaction at their destruction. The immediacy of wonder when encountering a space is contrasted with rampant eagerness to trash it; second thoughts about this destruction arrive only belatedly. The young men are instantly captivated by the mountain landscape that is their new home. King of Trees opens: “The tractor transporting the educated youth entered the valley and finally stopped on a small piece of level ground. Already gasping in admiration of the wild landscape along the way, when the educated youth learned that this was their destination, they all became extremely excited and jumped to the ground one after the other.”125 The narrator's language and images stress both the ruggedness of the land and the joy of the young men's encounter with it: they have been traveling through “wild landscape” (yejing) and now are in a valley, but level terrain remains scarce. The young men could not help but gasp in admiration (zantan) when traveling through the wilds,

and their excitement only grows when they learn they can have direct contact with it. That evening, the narrator excuses himself from the group and wanders off to take a closer look at the area; curious about its various features, he converses with Knotty Xiao. The following day, the educated youth climb one of the mountains with their new team leader. Reaching the top, they look out at the scenery and are rendered speechless: “All that remained of the distant mountains was their color, undulating blue spreading out, growing paler with each tier. We all gasped dumbly, opening our mouths one after another to speak but at a loss for words. I suddenly felt as though these mountains were like the ripples of the human brain. I just didn't know what they were thinking.”126 The final three sentences of this quotation powerfully juxtapose rows of actively thinking mountains on the one hand with those of young men who are “gasping dumbly” (daidai de chuanqi) and “cannot speak” (shuo bu chu hua) despite their mouths having opened one by one to do so (fenfen zhangzhe zui). Just as in the opening paragraph they jumped off the tractor one by one (fenfen tiao xia che lai), now they open their mouths in succession. Yet having become even more mesmerized by the mountains, the youths are rendered speechless, writing capturing what verbal discourse cannot. Even more important, the mountains are presumed to be actively thinking while the young men's brains appear frozen. Fascination with their surroundings, even curiosity about the consciousness of their surroundings, does not stop the young men from being swept along by rhetoric clamoring to reshape it. As everyone is “gasping dumbly” Page 150 →and the narrator ponders what the anthropomorphized mountains might be thinking, the team leader announces that they have been tasked with helping clear more than 1,600 acres of mountain land and replanting this space with “useful trees.” Li Li asks whether all the mountains within view will be planted with “useful trees, ” and when told that this is correct, he responds, “Magnificent. Transforming China is magnificent” (Weida. Gaizao Zhongguo, weida). The other young men all concur. To be sure, the educated youth agree with Li Li's comment on the importance of transforming China without explicitly stating that deforesting is itself a “magnificent” project. But they do not seem concerned that the very land that left them speechless just moments ago is to be cleared of vegetation. Moreover, they do not appear at all troubled when soon thereafter the team leader provides additional details: “We’ll do the following to the mountain where we're currently standing: topple its trees, burn its timber, terrace it, dig more holes, and plant useful trees.”127 In fact, rather than questioning whether such extensive manipulation of the mountain's ecosystems is really necessary, the young men immediately ask why the large tree dominating a nearly replanted neighboring mountain has not been felled.128 When the team leader responds that it has “become a spirit” and that real trouble awaits whoever cuts it down, the young men laugh and ask how this is possible. Their skepticism is understandable; as Li Li explains, the team leader's viewpoint represents the long-standing superstition that if a plant survives beyond its expected lifespan it has defied a law of nature and thus is assumed to be a spirit. Noteworthy from an ecological perspective are both the young men's attention to the one tree that has not been taken down and their apparent conviction that, spirit or not, it should meet the same fate as those around it, despite the young men's attraction to the landscape just moments before. Similar dynamics are repeated and intensified throughout King of Trees. With the notable exception of Li Li and a few of his close friends, the young men remain in awe of their surroundings. Just hours after agreeing that destroying mountain ecosystems, including large trees, is a magnificent task, their curiosity gets the better of them, and they decide to climb another mountain to take a look at a tree they had seen from a distance earlier that morning. Discovering that this is the King of Trees, the young men again find themselves rendered speechless, their minds empty. The narrator comments, “For a short while my mind went blank. I gradually felt ashamed that I had this useless mouth. I couldn't speak and couldn't sing. If I’d made a sound, it would have been just like that of a wild animal. After a long time, we looked at each other strangely and everyone just swallowed hard and gradually backed up.”129 Although the narrator's mind is blank for only a short Page 151 →while, it is a long time before the young men are able to release themselves from the spell of the tree, their shame being replaced by gradual retreat. The tree, on the other hand, retains its voice; the narrator describes its leaves as “gurgling, as though the tree were talking to itself, or as though it were playing with hundreds of children.”130 As before, the nonhuman takes on human voice while people stand speechless. Interestingly, however, when the time comes to begin felling trees—just a day after the incident described

above—the landscape appears to have lost its magic. The space that fewer than twenty-four hours before had presumably left him at a loss for words now is described relatively objectively: Our job was naturally [ziran] cutting trees. For hundreds of thousands of years, no one had touched this primeval forest, so the entire forest had grown into a single mass. Dodging one another, vying against one another, the trees left no room, from top to bottom. Vines crept from this tree to that tree…The grass was having a heyday. As it withered, each year's crop would add to the thickening crust, which the new blades had to break through.131 Naturally (ziran), the young men's task is to obliterate nature (ziran), a single yet dynamic mass, its trees having colonized vertical space, its vines horizontal space, and its undergrowth piling up everywhere, new shoots struggling to penetrate crusty old plants just to stay alive. To be sure, in the pages that follow the narrator does not record or even allude to conversations with/ among the other young men on the mountain, but neither does he describe himself or his companions as speechless. Instead, he calmly outlines the difficulties of felling trees. He claims that the forest has never been touched by human hands, but he does so not to incite anger at the loss of primeval species but instead to impress on the reader the physical labor required to eradicate them. His failure to note negative reactions to felling trees is particularly noteworthy in a section that does not record conversations, which perhaps were banned, but instead highlights thoughts and experiences. Notably, the only thing that seems to bother the young men about destroying the forest is the tedium and the arduousness of the task. They eagerly join Li Li in his efforts to cut down a colossal tree not unlike the King of Trees even while knowing that previous loggers have avoided this plant because the time required to cut it down would not justify the credit they would receive.132 The educated youths, on the other hand, voluntarily decide to join forces in this endeavor, “regardless of the man-hours.”133 To be sure, by concentrating their efforts on this one tree they are sparing a considerable Page 152 →number of smaller ones. But more significant is the satisfaction, indeed pleasure the young men derive from felling something so massive. The moments following the tree's fall find them somewhat shaken, but these feelings quickly dissipate, and the young men walk jovially down the mountain. The narrator contrasts the demeanor of the young men with that of Knotty Xiao, who having offered them eleventh-hour assistance now is visibly distressed. Emotions change with the felling of the King of Trees. Although he had been very eager to participate in destroying the region's other massive tree, the narrator opposes this project from the start. When Li Li declares the King of Trees his next target the narrator protests that they have other more pressing tasks, and besides, he asks, “wouldn't it be wasteful [to chop down] a very good tree [like the King of Trees]?”134 Li Li reminds the group of the symbolism and superstition with which many have imbued the tree and declares that felling it will teach the peasants a lesson: “What's really important is to educate the peasants. Old things [jiu de dongxi] must be destroyed…Once the King of Trees falls, a concept [guannian] will be gotten rid of…[What matters] is that people's ideology be completely renewed and cleansed.”135 King of Trees here allegorizes the destruction of Chinese culture and the violence committed against Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution; eradicating the “four olds” was often an excuse for attacking intellectuals whose thought was supposedly “feudal” or “reactionary,” individuals with a Western education, and those who interacted with Western businessmen and missionaries.136 Here, in an ironic twist, eradicating “olds” is an excuse for felling old trees. The young men do not appear convinced that the symbolism inherent in destroying the tree will trump the symbolism of the tree, and the conversation quickly changes course; when the crew treks up the mountain to the King of Trees soon thereafter, some—including the team leader and party secretary (zhishu)—leave their tools at home.137 Disturbed with what is transpiring above them, those at lower elevations cannot converse with or even look at one another. Speechlessness stemming from absolute wonder at the landscape here becomes speechlessness at its destruction. The narrator reveals his own emotions as deeply torn, something likely true of many others in the valley and up in the mountains: “My heart and mind were in turmoil. I couldn't quite figure out whether cutting the tree was right or wrong.”138 It is only now, with conditions bordering on the extreme, that he stops to ponder the morality of the group's behaviors. On the other hand, despite the large number of people visibly uncomfortable with the proposed demise of the King of Trees, Knotty Xiao alone actively tries to prevent

its destruction. The only person voicing outrage, much less fighting for the life of this tree, is the Page 153 →one absolutely certain that it should not be cut down; the rest of the group's ambivalence over its future guarantees its demise. People become even more agitated after the forest is set ablaze to clear land for farming. As the flames spread fiercely up the mountain, the narrator, other educated youth, and villagers alike begin to empathize with the trees, the narrator commenting simply, “The sight of the trees all silently lying there made people feel anxious for them.”139 The landscape responds differently here from in the American writer W. S. Merwin's poem “The Last One” (1967), which features the earth “swallowing” large numbers of people after they have felled an ecosystem's one remaining tree and attempted unsuccessfully to destroy its shadow; and in the Indian poet Gieve Patel's “On Killing a Tree” (1966), which depicts a tree silently succumbing to being dismembered.140 Resembling a boiling cauldron, the mountain in King of Trees screams out in pain; its surface scalded, it “released all kinds of strange cries, an entire universe alarmed.”141 For a brief period Li Li and his friends are the only individuals not concerned; instead they talk and laugh together as though nothing has happened. But soon they too are affected. The narrator observes, “The conflagration had burned everyone's spirits.”142 King of Trees suggests that although for some people even relatively minor human-induced ecological damage is intolerable, most are not moved until confronted with widespread devastation. And finally there are a few, like Li Li and his friends, who appear impervious to all but the most severely damaged environments. Especially interesting is that Li Li does not harbor any notable animosity toward mountain vegetation. Similar to the hunter in the Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji's short story “Nametoko yama no kuma” (Bears of Mount Nametoko, published posthumously) who tells each bear he slaughters that he does not hate it but that he has to make a living, Li Li is not the most dedicated logger because of any animosity toward trees or the nonhuman more generally.143 In fact, as he paradoxically comments when arguing that the King of Trees should be cut, “In the end, it doesn't matter whether we actually fell the King of Trees.”144 Rather, the flourishing trees and other mountain greenery, for him and to some extent most of the educated youths, first are part of the awe-inspiring scenery and then symbolize an “old thing” that must be destroyed. But when the trees finally are felled, they lose much of their numinous symbolism and become, in the young men's understanding, beings in distress. After summiting his first peak, the narrator likened the surrounding mountains to the ripples of the human brain and wondered what they were thinking. Only when their once-inaudible brain waves are translated into the “strange cries” of distress does he discover what they are thinking. But by then it is too late. Page 154 → The environmental actualities of King of Trees are substantial, the novella referring explicitly to destroying trees on the many mountains surrounding a rural village. The cultural actualities are also significant; depicting the traumas inflicted on both educated city youth and rural Chinese, A Cheng's text blatantly condemns the Cultural Revolution. Yet as noted at the beginning of this section, King of Trees, unlike much creative work on this period, does not use the nonhuman as a metaphorical vehicle for discussions of Chinese culture or history. Instead, it highlights the destruction of the nonhuman, making its environmental possibilities substantial. King of Trees nowhere suggests that what transpires on these mountains is unusual for this place or age, not surprising since forests across China were felled during the Cultural Revolution and at many other points in Chinese history. A Cheng remarks on this phenomenon in comments appended to the Japanese translation of his novella: It's well known that the result of the reckless deforestation that took place during China's Cultural Revolution was recurring, extraordinary floods and the destruction of ecosystems. Master of the Mountain [Yama no nushi; the title of the Japanese translation of King of Trees] is unusual in Chinese literature for dealing directly with this problem. [The characters of this novel—including] Knotty Xiao, who put up with the cruel fate of an inflexible bureaucracy, loved nature and the mountains, lived with the mountains, died with the mountains; Knotty's Xiao's wife, who silently followed him; and their child, who didn't know impurity—should garner the sympathy of the readers in my country who are confronting the problems of environmental destruction accompanying rapid modernization.145

A Cheng does not give himself enough credit; it is not just Chinese readers who are confronting the problems of ecological degradation in the wake of modernization. Many outside China, including some of his Japanese readers, share the plight of characters such as Knotty Xiao. And many more would have sympathy for such an individual. King of Trees is one of numerous creative works addressing ecodegradation whose focus on a particular scenario of ecological destruction belies the duplication of this destruction and human attitudes toward it in multiple sites—an excellent example of implicit ecocosmopolitanism that highlights environmental ambiguity. Creative texts that discuss anthropogenic environmental degradation regularly feature conflicting attitudes about the nonhuman and about relationships Page 155 →between people and the nonhuman as occurring within and among individuals and communities. Most obvious are the differences in beliefs, emotions, and perceptions between seemingly cohesive groups. More complex but no less frequent is the environmental ambivalence of individuals and groups, especially those culturally closest to the natural world. The creative works examined in this chapter depict people perceiving nature—whether regarded highly or deemed worthless, whether “loved” or “hated”—as existing to serve themselves. While these texts suggest that such conflicting attitudes can deeply affect how we understand the actual conditions of the environment, other literature highlights the pervasive ambiguity of basic knowledge about ecological health. These informational disjunctures form the topic of the next chapter.

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THREE / Underlining Uncertainty Ours is not the first age to feel flooded by information. Ecclesiastes 12:12 (dating to the fourth or third century B.C.E.) laments, “Of making books there is no end,” while in the first century, Seneca declared “the abundance of books is distraction” (distringit librorum multitudo).1 The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus likewise despaired about the growing profusion of printed matter circulating in Europe, asking, “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” “Information overload” is a buzzword of our times, with the amount of information on the planet's electronic devices soon to surpass the zettabyte mark.2 More does not necessarily mean more certain, and much of today's multitude of information—including that on environmental health—is notoriously ambiguous. In response, many have advocated that people narrow their focus, believing this will facilitate the resolution of social and environmental problems. But in fact, specializing can cause more problems than it solves; if people are concerned only with their own silos, buckets, and wells, and fail to recognize the interdependence of their knowledge, their areas of expertise with those of others, then societies jeopardize their future and that of the nonhuman world. The Korean writer Kim Kwanggyu's environmentally cosmopolitan poem “Saenggak i sai” (Relationship of Thoughts, 1979) takes up this phenomenon, prophesying the downfall of a planet where people, from poets to soldiers, engineers, and farmers, willfully or incidentally think only of their own specialty and where no one considers the relationships among different fields of endeavor. Yet in doing so this text paradoxically becomes nearly as short-sighted as the occupational obsessions it criticizes. It is so concerned with feeding the reader information on what will become of the world if people obsess over their professions (i.e., close themselves to other bodies of information and knowledge), rather than think about the relationships among professions, that it fails to address what will happen if people actually do ponder these interconnections, much less other facets of existence. Information overload is trumped by informational lacunae, leaving environmental and other conditions and futures even more uncertain: Page 157 → Poets think solely of poems and politicians think solely of politics and businessmen think solely of the economy and laborers think solely of labor and judges think solely of the law and soldiers think solely of war and engineers think solely of factories and farmers think solely of farming and government officials think solely of government office and scholars think solely of scholarship if this were the case it might seem that this world would become a paradise, but in fact the truth is that the relationship between poems and politics the relationship between politics and the economy

the relationship between the economy and labor the relationship between labor and law the relationship between law and war the relationship between war and factories the relationship between factories and farming the relationship between farming and government office the relationship between government office and scholarship if there is no one who thinks of these, then scraps of paper and power and money and exploitation and prisons and ruins and environmental pollution and agrochemicals and oppression and statistics are all that remain3 A scholar and translator of German literature as well as a prolific poet and one of the first Korean creative writers to give sustained attention to ecological Page 158 →degradation, Kim Kwanggyu wrote “Relationship of Thoughts” in the early years of his people's environmental consciousness, as Koreans became increasingly intolerant of the pollution engulfing their peninsula.4 This poem identifies environmental pollution and agricultural chemicals as the ecological destiny of a world where information and specific bodies of knowledge are not contextualized.5 It declares self-assuredly that environmental pollution is unavoidable if no one considers the links between war and factories and between factories and farming; agricultural chemicals are likewise deemed inevitable if no one thinks about the relationships between factories and farming or farming and government. But pollution and agrochemicals, like everything else mentioned in the fifth stanza, are also part of more complex entanglements. “Relationship of Thoughts” suggests that the connections among all occupations must be considered if the planet is to avoid becoming a morass of waste paper, prisons, ruins, oppression, and damaged environments. In other words, contrary to what some might think, isolating specialties creates not a paradise but a wasteland. Repetition governs “Relationship of Thoughts,” giving the illusion of certainty. But the poem undermines this confidence in key places, indicating how easily discourse on any number of subjects, including environmental degradation, can be read as valid information when in fact it is anything but. Kim Kwanggyu's stylistics highlight just how easily conditions can be conditional and thoughts can be manipulated, even in exhortations to think.

Each of the first nine lines of the opening stanza begins with a type of profession (poet, politician, etc.), followed by the subject marker n/nn, and then “solely” (oroji), their specialization (poems, politics, etc.), “only” (man), the object marker l, and the continuative form of the verb “to think” (think and; saenggak hago). The tenth and final line of the first stanza is identical to the nine that precede it except for its final word; saenggak hago (think and) is replaced by saenggak handamyn (lit. if think). That is to say, the lines of the first stanza all read: “[Type of employee] / [their field].” But it is not until the first stanza's final line that we learn that the information we thought we had been given (i.e., poets think solely of poetry, politicians think solely of politics) is actually not information at all in and of itself, but instead is part of a conditional: “If poets think only of poems…// It might seem that this world…”6 Moreover, this is a provisional statement with numerous strings attached: for the world to seem to become a paradise, all ten groups of individuals must think only of their professions, an unlikely prospect. What on first reading appears to be a series of declarative statements is in reality little more than the setup for an improbable scenario. Page 159 → The third stanza accentuates this dynamic. Its nine lines pair up the fields of endeavor found in the ten lines of the poem's opening stanza. Following the order of fields given in the first stanza, each line of the second stanza begins with a field (e.g., poems, politics) followed by “and” (gwa/wa), the field that appeared in the next line of the first stanza (e.g. [poems and] politics, [politics and] the economy), by the possessive i and then by “relationship” (sai). I.e., [field 1] [field 2] , which translates literally as “The relationship between poems and politics / the relationship between politics and economics…” The ninth line of the third stanza concludes with the object marker rl, only here letting the reader know that the text is not simply listing relationships, but that these relationships are the object of a verb, albeit one that does not appear until the next stanza. Moreover, unlike the first stanza, which concludes with “if” (myn), here it is not until the following stanza—“if there is no person [saram] who thinks of this [relationship]/ these [relationships]”—that the text employs the conditional. The scope is broadened from the ten types of employees to people in general. But even so, the likelihood of this scenario is unclear. It is of course doubtful that any one person would think of all of the relationships listed in the third stanza. Yet it is uncertain whether the object of the verb “thinks” is simply the relationship between government office and scholarship (given in the final line of the third stanza), or all the relationships listed in the third stanza. Chances are it is the latter, making the conditional likely (i.e., “if there is no person who thinks of [all these relationships]”), but the poem's language is sufficiently flexible to allow for the former: unlike in the first stanza, where lines are linked with saenggak hago (to think and), the lines of the third stanza end simply with “relationship” (sai).7 This complicates the fifth stanza, whose ten lines each list one by-product, mostly negative, of each of the ten professions enumerated in the first stanza (e.g., scrap paper [for poets/poems], power [for politicians/politics]). As in the first stanza, but unlike the third stanza, these lines are linked with “and” (gwa/wa). The poem's sixth stanza, its final line, claims that these phenomena are “all that remain” if the conditions listed in the third and fourth stanzas are met. Unlike the second stanza, which states simply that if a particular condition is met the world will not be the paradise that had been anticipated, the fifth stanza articulates the precise composition of the resulting world. But again, it is unclear whether the list has any chance of being actualized. Indeed, the tidy packaging and parallel structure of “Relationship of Thoughts” belies its loose ends, strands that leave many questions unanswered and hint at the confusion enfolding social as well as environmental degradation. Most significant, however, is the poem's failure to address what Page 160 →will happen if people do in fact think about the relationships among different disciplines; although it predicts the consequences of ignoring the relationships among disparate fields, Kim Kwanggyu's text is silent on the outcomes of actually contemplating these connections, much less reflecting on other matters. The poem implies that social and biophysical environments will be in jeopardy if people remain myopically attached to their narrow niches. But not addressing what will happen if they actually think about the larger picture means that much remains indistinct. The poem leaves open the possibility of a world that would be imperiled even if people were to consider the connections among different pieces of information and bodies of knowledge. “Relationship of Thoughts” gestures to the uncertainties of how to discuss the environmental problems facing

human societies and the natural world with which they and their cultural products constantly interact. The poem posits that multiple threats to the planet are deeply intertwined, that behind every social and ecological condition is a complex set of preconditions. To be sure, Kim Kwanggyu's text does not obviously privilege damage to ecosystems. Only two of the ten consequences of ignoring overspecialization directly implicate the nonhuman—environmental pollution and agricultural chemicals. But these two likely will suffuse the world that the poem anticipates. The other eight phenomena listed in the fifth stanza occur on or within contaminated soil and polluted air, and all are potentially involved in environmental degradation: wastepaper and ruined buildings litter terrain already full of agrochemicals; prisons confine both industrialists and environmental activists; and power, money, exploitation, and oppression all shape environments just as they are shaped by them. The lists in “Relationship of Thoughts” are only examples; there are far more types of employees, professions, and professional by-products than the text enumerates. But the choices given suggest that limits on potential damage are few.

Informational Ambiguity Today we can see that damaged environments are ubiquitous. So too are narratives, including creative texts, that speak of blighted ecosystems. Imparting and analyzing information and building knowledge about the conditions of environments, especially about detrimental changes to them, is a spatially or conceptually significant part of much discourse.8 Even more prevalent is rhetoric in which information on ecodegradation occupies a relatively peripheral position. But regardless of its conceptual weight or spatial presence, information on environmental damage often is ambiguous. With ecosystems Page 161 →always in motion, with so much destruction and regeneration of the nonhuman occurring seemingly regardless of people's behaviors, the precise human role in environmental transformation is often virtually impossible to decipher. Even when conditions are extreme, with industrial pollution visibly pervading the skies and agrochemicals the soil, data on ecodegradation, much less the human role in instigating it, often are contradictory or fragmented; interpretations and particularly policy implications of these data can be even more convoluted because so much is unknown and unknowable, at least at present. Still more ambiguous are data and interpretations of data on less noticeable human-induced changes to environments. And the preconceptions of researchers/observers, writers, and readers shape how they understand ecological information in complex and often contradictory ways. Information on human-induced environmental degradation can be ambiguous regardless of where it appears: a peer-reviewed scientific publication, a newspaper article or editorial, a literary work based on considerable research or one that relies on liberal doses of imagination. Comments by the narrator of Mahasweta Devi's novella eroykaikala, Praa Sahaa o pirath (Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, 1989) on the contrast between the rhetoric and the reality of tribal welfare apply as well to uncertainties about environmental conditions: “These pictures will reveal some truths and some lies. The truths and the lies are the same.”9 With their diminished claims to accuracy, creative texts that address the damage people inflict on the nonhuman tend to expose, negotiate, and even exploit the inconsistencies of information on human changes to ecosystems more than do other discourses. In creative texts, as in much narrative, uncertainty about the condition of environments results from incorporating contradictory and/ or fragmentary information about the etiologies, current status, patterns of progression and regression, and consequences of this degradation, as well as possible forms of remediation and prevention. Contradictory information on ecodegradation can be found extratextually, intertextually, and intratextually. Much discourse on damaged environments, especially creative discourse, is contradicted within the same text. For instance, a narrative might at one point call a river polluted only to speak of it at another point as flowing clearly, whether or not there has been any change to the river itself; likewise, a text might speak of a chemical as having one effect on the nonhuman only then to say it has another notably different effect, whether or not the actual impact of this chemical has altered significantly. A more subtle intratextual inconsistency might take the form of a character suffering no side effects from swimming in a polluted river or eating polluted fish.10 Intratextual contradictions stem from changes in the Page 162 →narrator's and the characters’ observations and opinions, as well as from differences in the observations/opinions among various characters and between narrators and characters. Intertextually inconsistent information refers to information that passively or dynamically, explicitly or implicitly, contradicts discourse in another text.11 For example, a creative work might speak of river pollution as

responsible for the deaths of people and animals, challenging government or industry reports that declare the pollution insignificant or deny it altogether. At times, these latter reports are actually included in the creative text. More frequently, they are referenced and discussed, whether in depth or in passing, or simply alluded to. Extratextual inconsistency arises when information intentionally or inadvertently contradicts phenomena in the experienced world. For instance, a text might declare a river polluted when it is not (or at least is not obviously polluted and has not been discussed as such), or it might describe a space as resplendent with foliage when actually it has been deforested. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter is Thoreau's Walden (1854), which transforms “a busy commercial and agricultural site with a long and complex history of human settlement into a remote forest lake.”12 More intriguing are creative works that forecast environmental harm by predicting the consequences of failing to remediate existing environmental damage and neglecting to impede anticipated ecodegradation. Such texts include everything from narratives set in the future or in clearly imagined spaces, including apocalyptic texts and much science fiction, to those set in the present that feature narrators/characters foretelling the future. Descriptions of impending ecodegradation are almost by default extratextually inconsistent because the world they envision has not (yet) been experienced. The certitude these texts display often masks great uncertainty about environmental futures. Intratextual and particularly inter- and extratextual inconsistencies often are deeply integrated. A river can be “known” to be unpolluted largely as a result of narratives, both written and oral, that claim it is clean; often it is “known” to be unpolluted simply by the absence of talk about its pollution. Thus, a creative text that posits this river as polluted contradicts both empirical conditions and extant narratives. Similarly, because a space is “known” to be deforested largely through narratives that claim it to be so, creative texts that speak of this space's brilliant foliage are at odds with both the experienced world and discourse on this space. Some creative works highlight these intra-, inter-, and extratextual inconsistencies in information about humaninduced damage to environments by referring to them explicitly. A narrator or character might speak openly about the difficulties of determining the characteristics or significance of Page 163 →damage to an ecosystem; a narrator or character also might draw attention to conflicting reports on the status of an ecosystem. But in literature, as in life, many of these inconsistencies are subtler and require additional sleuthing. With ecosystems always changing, and with interpretations of these changes always shifting, information on ecodegradation that once might have appeared inconsistent later no longer seems so, and information that once seemed straightforward later poses contradictions. In contrast with contradictory information on human-induced damage to ecosystems, which appears most often in texts with extended references to environmental harm or texts that conceptually prioritize ecological problems, fragmentary information about this degradation usually consists of brief or vague references to ecodegradation embedded in discourse on another subject, often one with only indirect connections to environmental harm. Its brevity and vagueness often render this information ambiguous. Further complicating matters, fragmentary discourse on environmental problems often is not immediately recognizable. Instead, most such information appears as simile or as (apparent) metaphor. For instance, creative texts often embellish accounts of human suffering with references to nonhuman suffering, but these works frequently are misread as concerned solely with human suffering. Other texts speak primarily of nonhuman suffering, but this suffering is interpreted, and often seems intended, as a metaphor for human suffering. Yet these writings too are potentially fruitful sources of information on the conditions of environments. Unlike contradictions, which usually result from a surfeit of data or interpretations of data, fragments typically stem from a deficit of information or even from obscurity about the focus of this information. Much information can be both fragmentary and contradictory: fragmented information often lends itself to contradictory interpretations, in addition to being intra-, inter-, and extratextually inconsistent. This chapter analyzes how ambiguous information about damage to the nonhuman is incorporated into works ranging from texts that mainly describe devastated ecosystems to those with only brief and often opaque references to environmental changes. I focus on the informational ambiguity of literary works that implicitly and explicitly raise but generally leave unanswered questions central to understanding human-induced ecodegradation.13 First I look at three texts that emphasize just how little people and animals know, and are

capable of knowing, about the reasons—both immediate and more fundamental—for environmental change. I then turn to literary works that provocatively suggest the presence of human-induced ecodegradation but are pointedly ambiguous as to whether ecosystems are actually damaged. After this I take up writings—including creative works about human-on-human Page 164 →violence—that underline the complexities of a similar problem: assessing degrees of ecological damage. The chapter's remaining two parts, like its opening section on Kim Kwanggyu's “Relationship of Thoughts,” explore textual ambiguities involving environmental futures. I focus on writings that question the resilience of the nonhuman and works that, although declaring environmental disaster imminent or at least inevitable, leave notably vague the longer-term consequences of such calamity. In this chapter I am primarily concerned with the uncertainties of information about ecodegradation that appear in poetry, short stories, and novels. Where appropriate, I examine how texts depict informational ambiguity as shaping attitudes and behaviors toward environments, as well as the condition of ecosystems more generally. But I defer discussions of how creative texts negotiate the ways people act on the actualities of damaged environments to Chapter 5 and analysis of the conflicts between information on ecodegradation and attitudes toward ecosystems to Chapter 6.

The Unknown and Unknowable Many creative works explicitly address ecological uncertainty: the narrator asks why the landscape is damaged or claims that characters, whether people or animals, are unaware of the reasons behind this damage. Such uncertainties can be rhetorical, the answers to questions obvious and the reasons for environmental change clear, at least to most readers if not also to characters. But such narratives also often expose the many lacunae in knowledge about environmental damage, especially those concerning both the immediate and the underlying causes of changes to ecosystems. Although conceptually significant, these questions usually do not occupy much textual space. Two notable exceptions are the Korean writer Kim Ch’unsu's poem “P’unggyng” (Landscape, 1988) and the Taiwanese writer Xin Yu's poem “Bao” (Leopard, 1972). The former is a series of questions about ecological changes, interrupted by the declaration that conditions are “incomprehensible”; the latter consists of statements on an animal's ignorance of the reasons behind changes to ecosystems. A sense of helplessness pervades both poems; without knowing the proximate and underlying causes of transformed environments, reconciliation, much less amelioration and prevention, are virtually impossible. Kim Ch’unsu began publishing poetry in the 1940s, after having studied art in Japan; many of his texts celebrate the natural world but some, like “Landscape,” depict it as having been compromised.14 “Landscape” refers immediately to gaps in human understandings of the nonhuman. The poem Page 165 →focuses on a single field, but its perspective is environmentally cosmopolitan; little effort is made to identify the field, which could be located almost anywhere. In the first and second stanzas the poem questions why the earth and sky are crying; in the first line of the third stanza it declares this situation unintelligible but then asks again why the earth weeps so plaintively: Why in this, the dead of night in the blue light of the moon is that field crying like that? Why does the wind that gusted about during the day also cry so plaintively after coming to that field?

This is incomprehensible. Why in this, the dead of night, is that field, quieter than the sea, crying like a sad beast?15 Like many creative texts featuring landscapes in pain, Kim Ch’unsu's poem generally is understood as personifying the natural world, as substituting nonhuman for human agony, or as indicating that the agony people have endured on the field was so overwhelming that it has spilled onto and changed the characteristics of both the field itself and the wind that goes there to spend the night. But if the origins of grief were so clear, the poem likely would not be a series of three questions, the first two separated from the third with the assertion “This is incomprehensible” (al su mnn ilida). The fact that the wind seems to cry plaintively only after arriving at the field of the first stanza suggests that the suffering of/on this field surpasses the suffering of/on other spaces, but we are not informed of the nature of this suffering. Also vague is the volume of the field's cries. The poem asks, “Why in this, the dead of night / is that field, quieter than the sea / crying like a sad beast?” It is unclear whether the field usually is quieter than the sea; or that the field's cries are loud, but still softer than the usual sounds of the sea; or even perhaps that the sea is crying, like the field and the wind, although its cries are even louder. The poem's questions are clearly rhetorical, encouraging the reader to contemplate the sorrows that suffuse the landscape that is the focus of the poem, as well as neighboring spaces. But the questions also can be taken Page 166 →more literally, as genuine queries. What puts landscapes in distress? A field, or at least the animals residing there, could be in agony from having witnessed human trauma, but likely also from having been harmed; perhaps the field's cries sound like those of a sad beast because the animals on the field are the ones crying. Chances are that the wind cries, and cries plaintively after arriving at this field, because it has witnessed suffering below, or noted the remnants of suffering; the wind also likely has been afflicted by and itself is transmitting some of this suffering. To be sure, the poem does not speak directly of human damage to environments. Yet its explicit focus is on nonhuman expressions of suffering, expressions perhaps intended to be taken figuratively but that also can have more literal significance. Repeating the verb “to cry” (ulda) personifies suffering. But ultimately the text's three questions—“Why is the field crying like that,” “Why does the wind cry so plaintively,” and “Why is the field crying like a sad beast”—go unanswered. The only resolution is a poetic one, the gradual discovery of how to describe nonhuman sorrow: while the opening stanza asks chrido ulgo innnga (lit. [why] is it crying in that way), and the second stanza chrk’edo slp’i unnga (lit. [why does the wind] also cry so plaintively), the final stanza declares srun chimsng ch’rm ulgo innnga (lit. [I don't understand why] it is crying like a sad beast). In other words, “in that way” (chrido) becomes “so plaintively” (chrk’edo slp’i) and finally “like a sad beast” (srun chims ng ch’rm). Ironically, the only way to describe the pain of the natural world appears to be through similes of nonhuman suffering. But even personifying the grief of the personified field provides no resolution. The ambiguity behind wailing ecosystems haunts many creative articulations of damaged landscapes, including the Taiwanese writer Xin Yu's implicitly ecocosmopolitan “Leopard.”16 Like “Landscape,” this poem by a Chinese émigré to Taiwan written in the early days of Taiwanese environmental consciousness focuses on the damage of a single space, but one that could be situated nearly anywhere leopards once roamed, including most of Africa and the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and eastern China and Korea. Xin Yu's text first sketches disappearing vegetation and then the extinction of the grassland itself. “Leopard” explicitly addresses the paucity of available information on dramatic changes to environments: A single leopard on the edge of a grassland crouching does not know why Page 167 →

many flowers fragrant many trees verdant the firmament opens and contains everything This leopard that once roared and plundered does not know what fragrant flowers are or what verdant trees are A single leopard that crouches not knowing why the firmament deserted and silent the flowers and trees quiet a grassland d i s a p p e a r s17 Confusion about the condition of environments begins in the final line of the opening stanza: “[the leopard] does not know why” (bu zhi weishenme). The reader is not told what is puzzling the leopard. Instead, the following stanza moves back in time, indicating that the heavens opened and enveloped all the grassland's flora and fauna. It is possible that the phrase “firmament opens” indicates a “natural” disaster such as a typhoon that would radically change a landscape, but considering information presented later in the poem it is more likely that “firmament opens” is a euphemism for sweeping human-induced environmental devastation. In the third stanza the poem reveals that the leopard is unfamiliar with “fragrant flowers” and “verdant trees.” Not only did the leopard not witness the opening of the firmament itself, but actually “fragrant flowers” and “verdant trees” disappeared some time ago.18 They disappeared not simply from the particular grassland featured in the poem but from all the grasslands the leopard has traversed. If only one space had been affected, the animal would not know why there are no flora here, but it would be familiar with flora more generally. Fragrant flowers and verdant trees are not the only nonhuman bodies that disappeared from this and other landscapes. The third stanza also indicates that in the past the leopard captured prey. Animals apparently outlived healthy vegetation, since the leopard encountered the former but not the latter. But this was not the case for long; the poem's use of the term “once [i.e., in the past]” (ceng) suggests the leopard's quarry has also disappeared or at Page 168 →least become so dispersed that the leopard no longer can catch it. The life of this one remaining leopard is clearly in danger. In the fourth stanza an even direr picture emerges—the leopard is still alive and crouching as before, but the “firmament” is now “deserted and silent.” The nonhuman was displaced from the grassland to the “firmament” only to be obliterated into silence. On the other hand, by speaking of flowers and trees as “quiet” (jiji), not as nonexistent, this stanza also suggests either that not all flora were displaced, thereby contradicting claims made two stanzas earlier, or that some have regenerated. To be sure, these are not the “fragrant” and “verdant” trees of the second and third stanzas, but they do point to the possibility of revival. On the other hand, this possibility is quickly undermined. In the fifth stanza the poem claims simply that the grassland “disappears” (xiaoshi), presumably taking with it the leopard at its edge, the leopard that does not know why silence pervades heaven and earth and why the remaining flowers and trees are quiet. Xiaoshi () is written with a space between the characters (i.e., ), suggesting that the obliteration of the grassland was gradual, but total.

In some ways Xin Yu's poem is a relatively straightforward exposé of changing and eventually disappearing ecosystems: what once was a space of fragrant flowers, towering trees, and contented carnivores has been razed and transformed into a place with few if any traces of its former existence. Yet a great deal remains unspecified. The poem says the leopard is unfamiliar with vegetation and does not know why the landscape appears the way it does, but it leaves unclear whether the animal's ignorance stems from the shortcomings of this particular creature, from the fact that it is an animal, or because nobody/nothing can know, human or nonhuman. From its perch on the edge of a grassland the leopard would have had no difficulty observing humans and their cultural products transforming and replacing their nonhuman counterparts. The underlying causes are less apparent to people and animals alike. Destroying landscapes without really knowing the deeper reasons why (i.e., why the desire to occupy more space, if this desire is even recognized as such)19 has potentially lethal consequences for people and nature alike. The concluding stanza of “Leopard” suggests that both the animal at the edge of the grassland and the grassland itself now exist only in the poem and in the memories of the poem's readers. As the Italian poet Daria Menicanti writes in “Felini” (Felines, 1986), “The long lustrous tiger, the blooming leopard /—the wary, the silent grace— / still they threaten us / but with their extinction” (La lunga tigre lucente, il leopardo fiorito /—la guardinga, la silenziosa grazia— / tuttora ci minacciano / ma della loro scomparsa).20 Readers cannot but wonder when the same will be said of the landscape that replaces the grassland in Xin Yu's poem. Knowing Page 169 →how but not really knowing why the grassland disappears augurs poorly for the new inhabitants of this space. The brevity of Kim Ch’unsu's “Landscape” and Xin Yu's “Leopard” belies their significance. Both texts invite attention to how little is known not simply about the immediate causes of damage to environments but also about the more fundamental reasons people drastically reshape them. To some extent this uncertainty haunts all creative works concerned with environmental degradation. Although Kim Ch’unsu's and Xin Yu's texts both feature situated damage, they are notably vague as to when and where this damage occurs, and even more so as to why. These implicitly ecocosmopolitan poems describe phenomena that have been replayed on multiple continents, with similar obscurity.

Making Sense of Symptoms Closely related to why environments change is whether observed phenomena signal environmental damage, either human- or nonhuman-induced. Kim Ch’unsu's crying field and Xin Yu's silent, empty, and then disappearing grassland have clearly been injured, although they are not explicitly identified as sites of ecodegradation. Yet many other symptoms are more difficult to decipher. Anyone familiar with trees likely would not see anything out of the ordinary in a grove of bare trees, presuming it is winter and these trees are deciduous.21 But instead of observing these trees or seeing photographs of them from which season and type of tree can be discerned, what if one were simply told about the existence of a grove of bare trees? It would be impossible to know—without other information—whether this condition was part of the trees’ annual cycle or whether trees without foliage were unusual or unexpected for a particular time and place, the result perhaps of a forest fire, an insect blight, or soil poisoned by agrochemicals. Many creative works raise similar ambiguities: narrators and characters lament current conditions, including the absence of particular flora or fauna, but do not provide sufficient information to indicate whether this absence signals environmental damage, whether it is to be expected, or whether, in cases where the absent nonhuman has been replaced, this absence in some sense is canceled out. A further complication is that damaged environments, such as lands inundated by seasonal floods or hills blackened by frequent fires, can themselves be “usual” or “expected” parts of a cycle, however irregular. Likewise, spaces such as agricultural fields, where particular species have been eradicated to promote the growth of other species, or even spaces Page 170 →assumed hostile to biodiversity, often can become thriving places of ecological splendor. Taking this idea to an extreme is the narrator of the Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), who declares, [A team of entomologists] had mistakenly discovered [a] metal cemetery [in the Amazon] while chasing after only one of several thousand rare forms of butterfly. The machines found all dated back

to the late fifties and early sixties—F-86 Sabres, F-4 Phantoms, Huey Cobras, Lear Jets and Piper Cubs, Cadillacs, Volkswagens, Dodges and an assorted mixture of gasguzzlers, as well as military jeeps and Red Cross ambulances. After so many years in the forest, the vehicles were slowly crumbling, piece by piece, bit by bit, into a fine rusty dust…What was most interesting about the discovery of the rain forest parking lot was the way in which nature had moved to accommodate and make use of it. The entomologists were shocked to discover that their rare butterfly only nested in the vinyl seats of Fords and Chevrolets and that their exquisite reddish coloring was actually due to a steady diet of hydrated ferric oxide, or rusty water. There was also discovered a new species of mice…Finally, there was a new form of air plant…There were, along with these new forms of life, a myriad of traditional varieties of flora and fauna that had somehow found a home, a food source or way of life in this exclusive junkyard. It was an ecological experiment unparalleled in the known world of nature.22

At heart are the inherent difficulties and multiple ramifications of identifying a body, much less bodyscape, as damaged; determining the existence of ecodegradation might at times be a matter of opinion, but such opinions can significantly affect policies and (further) human shaping of environments. Speaking of landscapes as lacking particular (a)biotic nonhuman entities, yet leaving ambiguous the implications of these absences, the Korean writers Chng Hynjong's poems “P’um” (Protective Embrace, 1989) and “Tlp’an i ch ngmak hada” (The Field is Forlorn, 1992) and Song Sugwn's poem “Chirisan ppkkuksae” (Mount Chiri's Cuckoo, 1991) provide important perspectives on this phenomenon. Unlike “Mount Chiri's Cuckoo,” Chng Hynjong's poems are not specific to Korea. On the other hand, Song Sugwn's poem could just as easily have been titled “Mount Fuji's Cuckoo” or “Cuckoo of the Matterhorn.” Like Kim Ch’unsu's “Landscape” and Xin Yu's “Leopard, ” these creative works focus on events that transcend particular times and places. Page 171 → Chng Hynjong's “Protective Embrace” features an individual longing to be held or at least to witness an embrace.23 The poem consists of his speculations about where contact might actually take place: initially, where he personally might be held, and then where he might find the rain, the tree, and finally the embrace of rain and tree: Like trees standing in the rain, I wonder where I can be held. I wonder where the rain is, and the location of the tree(s). And the protective embrace they make, I wonder where it is.24 Unlike the speaker in Kim Ch’unsu's “Landscape” and the animal in Xin Yu's “Leopard,” who do not know why ecosystems exhibit particular characteristics, the speaker in “Protective Embrace” wonders where parts of ecosystems have been relocated. “Protective Embrace” raises a number of questions. Most obvious, and forming the core of the poem, are those concerning the (new) locations of trees, the rain, and their mutual embrace. More subtle and significant in identifying actual ecodegradation are questions about the condition of the observed ecosystem, not to mention its dimensions: the speaker could be referring to a backyard or to an entire planet. He wonders where the rains have

gone but gives no indication that the ground is parched. Perhaps the rains are long overdue; perhaps they are only several days late. Perhaps the land is suffering, perhaps not. Even more uncertainty surrounds how much of this landscape's vegetation has been relocated. In the opening line the poem refers to “trees” (namudl) standing and being held by the rain, yet the next reference to flora is not to “trees” but instead to “tree(s)” (namu), the Korean noun namu signifying either a single tree or multiple trees. So it is possible that the landscape is devoid of trees. It is equally possible that the poem is commenting on the removal of a single, perhaps favored tree. The swapping of namudl with namu suggests the latter but leaves open the possibility of the former. Also interesting is that in the first line the poem's Page 172 →speaker compares himself, a single being, to “trees [namudl] standing in the rain” rather than to a single tree standing in the rain, as the word namu would imply. The awkwardness of this phrasing suggests a deliberate move in the poem from plural to singular, one that paradoxically could indicate either intensified or decreased damage to the ecosystem where the poem's speaker stands: perhaps only one tree has survived its removal or perhaps only one tree has been removed. On the other hand, considering the context of the fifth line, “tree” is itself a clumsy translation of namu—it is much more likely that the poem's speaker, when mentioning the embrace of rain and flora, would ask about the location of trees, not a single tree. Fogging its references to rain and trees, “Protective Embrace” suggests but does not confirm ecodegradation. On the other hand, the poem implies that even if the ecosystem as a whole is damaged, its component parts might not be; the poem's speaker wonders where trees have been relocated, not whether they exhibit distress or have disappeared. This is in contrast with Chng Hynjong's environmentally cosmopolitan “The Field Is Forlorn,” where animals have been destroyed so as to allow plants to flourish. “The Field Is Forlorn,” one of several poems Chng Hynjong wrote on longing for grasshoppers, bemoans the absence of these animals on an otherwise seemingly healthy, anonymous autumn field:25 In the autumn sunlight, in the autumn air in the ripening rice dazzling heaven and earth, but ah, the field is forlorn— there are no grasshoppers! Oh this inauspicious silence— Life's golden link has been severed······ 26 Heaven and earth are dazzling (nunbusida), and the rice is ripening, but the poem indicates that such conditions neither conceal nor compensate for the lack of grasshoppers. In fact, the absence of this insect affects the speaker so deeply that he declares forlorn (chngmak hada) a field he just has identified as dazzling and fertile. Interesting here is the speaker's momentary delay, despite his title “The Field Is Forlorn,” in noting the absence of grasshoppers. He claims he became aware of this lack only after soaking in the wonders of the autumn scenery. Then, his sorrow penetrating more deeply, he hyperbolically intones the severing of “life's golden link” (saengmy ng i hwanggm kori). Chn Hynjong's poem is nothing if not intratextually contradictory, a broad frame painting desolation, then destruction (the poem's title and second half) surrounding a portrait of brilliance and fecundity (the poem's first half). Grasshoppers might once have thrived here, but they probably Page 173 →have been eradicated by agrochemicals; the poem does not speak of these substances explicitly, but the combination of a flourishing rice crop and an absence of grasshoppers—a known rice pest easily controlled with chemicals—strongly suggests their use. Removing grasshoppers has made the field forlorn by dissolving a vital part of its ecosystem. But sunlight, air, and rice all dazzle even as grasshoppers disappear; rice production, in fact, depends on their disappearance.

Although the title and second half of “The Field Is Forlorn” attempt to negate the first half, and the first half undercuts the title and second half of the poem, neither position dominates: vital links are broken but heaven and earth still amaze. The contradiction between the casing and the center of Chng Hynjong's poem elucidates one of the great ambiguities of farming: the coexistence of production and destruction, indeed the nearly constant reliance of production on eradicating animals and plants, including many designated as “weeds.” “The Field Is Forlorn” shows how ecosystems can be damaged, even to the extent of having their most vital parts removed, without losing their vitality. “Mount Chiri's Cuckoo”—written by one of Korea's most revered lyricists—is more ambiguous. It suggests but neither confirms nor denies the disappearance of animals, and is even more unclear about the damage to ecosystems.27 Song Sugwn's text begins with the claim that “On many mountain peaks, many cuckoos / were crying, crying / as a group were crying, crying.”28 The speaker then states that this was an illusion, that “Three, three, three springs passed / before I, seasoned with sorrow / discovered / that the truth was [silsang n] it was a single bird [han mari i ppkkuksaeim l /alanaetta].” Although its title identifies a specific site—Mount Chiri, South Korea's second-highest peak and one of its three most celebrated mountains—the poem begins with a more global perspective. But the geographic scope narrows in the second stanza, where the fantasy is blamed on echoes at a particular site: At the foot of Mount Chiri when on a single summit, the actual, hiding cuckoo emits a single cry it's echoed by the next peak and echoed by the next peak after that so I knew [alatta] that the cries were those of many cuckoos.29 Echoes convinced the speaker that the single cry of a single bird was multiple cries of multiple birds. By using alatta, the past tense of the verb alda (to Page 174 →know), to indicate his relationship with this fantasy, the speaker underlines its power; he discovered (alanaetta) the truth but knew (alda) as truth what turned out to be fantasy. Certain geological configurations, including Mount Chiri and surrounding peaks, can produce this effect, and if people expect only to hear but never to see birds, they can easily make the mistake the speaker describes, believing there many birds when in fact there is just one. “Mount Chiri's Cuckoo” emphasizes how easily people can be fooled into believing a species more robust than it actually is. The poem's language accentuates the power of echo, the first two lines reading literally: yr [many] sanponguri [peaks] e [on] yr [many] mari [counter for animals] i [possessive] ppkkugiga [cuckoo, subject marker] / ulm [n. crying] ul [vb. crying]. The first two stanzas repeat the words many (yr), peaks (ponguri), animal (mari), cry (ulda), three (sk/sam). Symptoms given in the remaining three stanzas of “Mount Chiri's Cuckoo” are more difficult to decipher; the poem's speaker suggests but does not state explicitly that the one remaining bird has vanished. In the third stanza he claims that he saw Mount Chiri's chain of peaks “settling in stillness / the cuckoo's crying gone.” He then notes, “For the first time a silent river opened up” and in the fourth stanza says he sees the Smjin River, which enters the sea at Kwangyang Bay off South Cholla Province (extreme southwest South Korea), rolling down in swelling waves and lapping the shores of the South Sea's many islets.30 In the fifth and final stanza attention returns to the cuckoo's cry, but this cry is seen, not heard: One day in spring, those tears having vanished, at the foot of Mount Chiri the cry of one crying cuckoo

the cry left over as the very last sad color of this life the cry incinerating this entire pebbled flower garden of rhododendrons—all this I saw.31 The speaker's synesthesia does not preclude the existence of an actual bird, but it does leave open the possibility that no bird remains, that the echoes of the final bird's cries have been absorbed into other parts of the natural world. In contrast with Chn Hynjong's “Protective Embrace” and “The Field Is Forlorn,” Song Sugwn's poem never speaks explicitly of cuckoos as having been anthropogenically displaced or destroyed. In fact, in an interesting twist, it is the bird's cry that “incinerates” (taeuda) flowers, albeit those in a human-constructed space. But the phrase “very last sad color of this life” (isng i srun maen majimak pikkal) suggests that the bird itself might have disappeared. That this has happened on Mount Chiri (Chirisan), part of Page 175 →Korea's Chirisan National Park and one of the peninsula's most revered sites, bodes ill for the nation's other ecosystems. The Taiwanese writer Luo Qing's poem “Liuxing gequ” (Pop Songs, 1972) demands, “Tell me / what kind of river is a river without branches / what kind of lake is a lake without reflection / what kind of sea is a sea without living things.”32 By itself, this request for information suggests that the poem's speaker is confronted by ecologically devastated terrain. The lines that follow, although not referring explicitly to environmental destruction, reinforce this interpretation: “Tell me, tell me (But we're all selfish and think only of our own gain) / (A swarm pursuing money, sex, fame, and power) / (We're all…).” On the other hand the references to a river without branches, a lake without reflection, and a sea without living things are preceded by lines suggesting that at least the land-based natural world has not changed significantly: “Tell me / what kind of flowers are the flowers about to bloom in the wind and rain / what kind of trees are the trees about to crack in the lightning and rain / what kind of moon is the moon about to rise in the clouds and rain.” The ambiguity is significant. As in the other texts examined in this section, symptoms of environmental harm appear undeniable, but no clear diagnosis can be made.33

Assessing Damage Song Sugwn's “Mount Chiri's Cuckoo,” Chng Hynjong's “Protective Embrace” and “The Field Is Forlorn,” and similar texts highlight the difficulties inherent in making sense of symptoms of possible ecological significance. Other creative works underline the complexities of another source of uncertainty, namely the degree of ecological damage. Most noteworthy are those texts that at once set up and undermine dichotomies in ecohealth between spaces, between species, between subsets or individual members of species, and between spaces and species. Establishing the presence of ecodegradation and determining its severity often involve contrasting clearly “damaged” bodies with their seemingly “healthy” counterparts—rivers littered with debris with those flowing clearly; birds dying from gunshot wounds with those flying freely; tigers dying from gunshot wounds with those cavorting playfully; a healthy animal inhabiting an otherwise devastated landscape. But many creative works establish these contrasts only to destabilize them, casting doubt on the actual condition of presumably spared plants, animals, and spaces. Some, such as the Taiwanese writer Rongzi's poem “Chong de shijie: zhameng de huaxiang” (Insect World: Portrait of a Grasshopper, 1983), explicitly Page 176 →distinguish between polluted and unpolluted zones. Yet their descriptions of the latter suggest that these spaces also have been at least somewhat affected. Other texts, such as the Taiwanese writer Shang Qin's prose poem “Ji” (Chicken, 1993), contrast different members of a species, one group suffering at human hands and the other leading an apparently peaceful life, that nonetheless have much in common. Creative works such as the Taiwanese writer Yang Mu's poem “Zuotian de xue de ge” (Song of Yesterday's Snow, 1985) similarly contrast the fates of different members of a species but leave unclear how much damage has been done to the species as a whole and how severely the landscapes both subsets inhabit have been damaged. The extent of injury to environments is also ambiguous in poems such as Yang Mu's “Xiatian” (Summer, 1971), which describes a scene of seemingly thriving green—whether literal or figurative—only to declare the space ecologically compromised. This is in contrast with Chng Hynjong's poem “The Field is Forlorn,” which although also featuring a landscape in which some groups (albeit of different species) are killed and others thrive, is less ambiguous than “Song of Yesterday's Snow” concerning the overall health of the ecosystem both groups share. Yang Mu's poem points to the problems inherent in equating green with ecological health.34 Together, these and related narratives challenge diagnoses of environmental health, suggesting but not elaborating on the ubiquity of ecodegradation and the near impossibility of isolating and maintaining spaces untouched by its tentacles. The damage discussed in these texts is spatially

pervasive. Leaving the location of this damage for the most part unspecified, each of the poems examined here reaches far beyond its origins and in so doing has transnational implications. Rongzi was one of the first women to make her name in postwar Taiwanese poetry, and her oeuvre depicts diverse relationships between people and the natural world.35 One of her most important texts from an ecological perspective is “Insect World: Portrait of a Grasshopper,” written in the early days of Taiwanese antipollution protests and nature conservation movements and narrated by a grasshopper. Contentedly surveying its “extremely prosperous kingdom” (wo de wanguo jiqi fanchang) from its perch on a tree in summertime, the insect announces a sharp dichotomy between “my plentiful green world” (fengying lüse shijie) and the “polluted world of human beings” (renlei wuran le de shijie). It asserts that people “often must eat the fumes of smoke from burning coal / and their own sulking air.” In contrast, the grasshopper claims, here in its plentiful green world “I enjoy glittering and translucent celestial dew / often with fragrant, cheerful flowers as companions.”36 While humanity swallows thick, murky, poisoned air, the grasshopper feasts on nearly transparent, twinkling drops of nectar. Not surprisingly, Page 177 →given these conditions, the occupants of the “polluted world of human beings” are sullen, while those of the “plentiful green world” are jovial. The grasshopper understandably declares that it “truly does not want to exchange [jiaohuan]” this prosperous world for the defiled human world. But the language of the poem suggests that the two worlds might be closer than expected, and the border between them not so impermeable. The grasshopper states that from its perch in the green world it can identify the moods of the human realm and even see what people are eating. This suggests that people live not so far away. Furthermore, although the grasshopper asserts that its world is one of plenty, it does not substantiate this claim, leaving open the possibility that the “insect world” might already be one in name alone. In the poem's opening stanza the grasshopper emphasizes that it is sitting by itself (du zuo). As the selfanointed “king” of the realm, there presumably are times when it must perch alone above its subjects. But it is noteworthy that when the animal descends from its branch, its companions (ban) are limited to “fragrant, cheerful flowers.” The grasshopper speaks eloquently of its “green” world, one that enjoys verdant vegetation, but there is no sign that it shares this space with other animals. To be sure, the insect gives no indication that its realm has experienced mass exterminations. But the “cheerfulness” of the flowers easily could provide a short-term barrier against the sullenness creeping in from the human world. So it is possible that the insect's home already has been damaged and that it might eventually have no choice but to “exchange” worlds. Also important, considering the human tendency throughout history to invade “green worlds,” is the possibility that people soon will infiltrate the grasshopper's realm. The “exchange” will be asymmetrical: pollution generally penetrates less polluted areas more readily than flowery fragrances penetrate smoggy spaces. In fact, a major difference between the two, more important than their smog levels, is the fragility of the grasshopper's realm compared with the robustness of the “human” domain. This difference is highlighted in the third stanza, where the grasshopper contrasts “glittering and translucent celestial dew” (jingying xianlu) and “fragrant, cheerful flowers” with “fumes of smoke from burning coal” and “sulking air” (menqi). The future of the grasshopper's Eden hardly seems secure. “Insect World” suggests that the planet cannot be bifurcated into “green” (nonhuman) and “polluted” (human) realms, however seductive and comforting this division might be. Rongzi's poem is ambiguous about the extent to which human behaviors have already transformed the grasshopper's “green world.” But it leaves open the possibility that this space, like so many “green” spaces before it, soon will become indistinguishable from the “polluted world of human beings.” More than a simple exposé and condemnation Page 178 →through the voice of a grasshopper of how people have damaged their environments, Rongzi's poem invites readers to ponder the seemingly inevitable spread of these spaces and their continued absorption of other spaces near and far. The uncertainty of “Insect World” underlines the ambiguity of these happenings and highlights the need for greater vigilance and knowledge. In the same way that “Insect World” contrasts the condition of different spaces, the Taiwanese modernist and surrealist writer Shang Qin's prose poem “Chicken”—written a decade later with the burgeoning of Taiwanese environmental consciousness—contrasts that of different subsets of a species, in this case chickens.37 “Chickens” portrays one group of poultry as suffering at human hands while indicating that the other, before its eradication, led a peaceful life. But in fact, not only has the latter group not disappeared, it too is at the mercy of people; the

first-person narrator's concern with the most obviously abused animals has literally deafened him to the voices of those in a more ambiguous position. As is true of Chn Hynjong's “Protective Embrace,” “Chicken” refers directly to humans killing animals, but unlike its Korean counterpart it does not temper this discourse by describing other flourishing creatures. Instead, it focuses on animal abuse, and chickens confined to factory farms in particular. The narrator of “Chicken” states that while eating a fast-food lunch in a quiet corner of the park, “it suddenly occurred to me that it had been several decades since I’d heard a rooster crow.”38 The peacefulness of his surroundings is punctuated by loss. Using the bones that came with his meal, he attempts to reconstruct the animal's skeleton, hoping to create a “bird capable of summoning the sun” (yi zhi nenggou huhuan taiyang de qinniao). He is disappointed that he cannot find the animal's vocal cords, but he readily explains this absence, claiming that birds bred solely to eat and (re)produce themselves have no need to cluck; nor does the artificial sunlight of factory farms allow for dreams or dawns that might inspire birdsong. “Chicken” condemns the poultry industry, a significant presence in Taiwan, where chicken is a staple of many diets. Shang Qin's text also raises questions about the fate of this animal more generally. The narrator of “Chicken” suggests that because he cannot find traces of vocal cords in his fast-food meal, the chicken he is eating must not have possessed them. But in fact he cannot find traces of vocal cords because birds have no vocal chords; they make sounds by tightening the muscles of their syrinx, a structure located at the divide of the trachea.39 By itself, the narrator's ignorance of basic avian anatomy would not result in a loss of credibility. Yet this unawareness accentuates how little he knows about chickens, and, even more important in this context, about how people treat them. The Page 179 →narrator depicts factory farms as spaces devoid of animal cries, when in fact they are notoriously cacophonic. Moreover, even if birds had vocal cords, it is unlikely they would be intact and recognizable in a fast-food meal. Of even greater significance is the narrator's implication that for decades all chickens have been confined to factory farms. In Taiwan, as in most of the world, chickens are raised in a variety of spaces, on a variety of scales, both in the countryside and in large cities. It is unlikely that chickens have been inaudible in every place the speaker has been in the last few decades; even in Taiwan's urban areas, where their squawks must compete with a plethora of other sounds, they can often be heard. The narrator has good intentions; he laments the fate of suffering animals and addresses the implications of this suffering for human lives. In the final stanza he claims that “under artificial sunlight / there are neither dreams / nor dawns.” He is clearly referring to the practice at factory farms of denying chickens exposure to natural light. He also could be commenting on what has or is likely to become of the spaces people inhabit: deprived of the sounds of animals, or at least chickens, they next might be robbed of sunlight. But it is relatively simple to condemn obvious mistreatment and to strengthen accusations of abuses by exposing significant differences, in this case between animals confined to factory farms and those allowed daylight. The cruelty to which chickens in factory farms are subjected is easily imagined even by those who have never visited one; the narrator misconstrues the precise nature of conditions, but there is no denying that chickens suffer there. More difficult to discern are the traumas endured by animals closer to home. Confusion about the condition, even the existence of these creatures is symptomatic of larger lacunae in understandings of environmental problems. It is hard enough to stimulate interest in obvious abuses; learning about more clandestine exploitation is even more challenging. Shining somewhat different light on the uncertainties surrounding degrees of ecological damage is the Taiwanese avant-garde writer Yang Mu's “Song of Yesterday's Snow,” written like Rongzi's “Insect World” in the early days of Taiwan's environmental movements. A passionate reader of John Keats and William Butler Yeats as well as Chinese literature of all eras and genres, Yang Mu is known in part for his celebration of nature worship among Taiwan's indigenous cultures, but he also has written on the destruction of ecosystems in Taiwan and around the world.40 Similar to “Chickens,” “Song of Yesterday's Snow” contrasts the conditions of different subsets of a species, in this case standing and felled evergreens, but leaves unclear how much damage has been done to the species as a whole, as well as to its larger ecosystems. Opening with a description of a mountain landscape in early winter, Page 180 →the poem speaks of the gradually descending snowline and of people hurrying home from a day of skiing and sledding. The dark green conifers are capped in white; together they are “a type of guide, desire of the universe” (yi zhong zhiyin, yuzhou zhi yu).41 All appears well. But the ambience changes in the final line of this verse, where wind, accompanied by the sporadic sounds of a whirring saw, resonates from the streets

below. The following stanza elaborates on the damage these saws inflict on trees: Power saws? That is the unfinished work of autumn, in the cold, continuing diligently, like the teeth of the Taotie [an ancient Chinese monster known for being gluttonous and ferocious]. Work not finished before summer, it ferociously gnaws into the fibers of falling leaves, like senses following the track of a bundle of hair bound in red cloth lucid and lively saws pass through dusks and dawns of times past42 Although the saw's teeth first slice their way through the veins of falling (i.e., dead) red autumn leaves, they soon reach living wood. “Song of Yesterday's Snow” sharply contrasts natural with human-induced death; while the falling red leaves are likened to hair wrapped in red cloth (red is the color of joy and good fortune in Chinese culture), the teeth are demonized, accused of cutting through a historical repository. Talk then returns to the descending snowline; the remainder of the second stanza and all of the third discuss the deepening drifts and how the people, now housebound, entertain themselves. Snow is several times said to be “falling happily” (kuaile de xiazhe) and to “envelop our spirits with its happy form” (yi kuaile de xingtai longzhao le women de jingshen).43 Spared the Taotie, the snow's happiness (kuaile) is contagious. But this comforting vision is quickly shattered. “Song of Yesterday's Snow” concludes: I am free to imagine, when just a moment ago snow touched distant conifer forests, I can hear the voice of blood gushing, the breath of love and beauty, and a lucid and lively power saw intermittently from the street below a loud voice arrives—autumn's unfinished sonata. When I go deep into this region of mountain chains and valleys, passing above the snowline that melody seems to be the theme of our anticipated new songs massacring, destroying conifer forests: desire of the universe.44 Page 181 → The narrator is certain of the fate of the evergreens. With even a blizzard apparently unable to quiet power saws that tear into trees like a fierce and gluttonous Chinese monster, with the sounds of these machines and the voices of agonized flora providing the melodies of the foreseeable future, the two groups of trees—those slaughtered and those topped with snow—soon will become one. Less evident from “Song of Yesterday's Snow” are current conditions, both of the trees and of the ecosystems they inhabit. Although power saws show the trees no mercy when they attack, it is unclear how frequently these assaults occur. More important, it is not certain just how many conifer forests have been affected.45 In the final line of the first stanza the poem describes the noise of these machines as resonating “from the street below,” suggesting that until now the damage has been localized. But the lines that precede this claim hint that even these sounds might be imagined:

When I also slid down, freely imagining like this my ears hearing the sounds of the rivers and seas, wind that barely blows and stops, and the intermittent sounds of a power saw coming from the street below.46 The speaker does not specify which sounds, if any, echo only in his mind and which are audible in the empirical world. He imagines sliding snow, but the poem is vague as to whether he also imagines the voices of water, wind, and whirring saws, or whether he actually hears these sounds. His graphic description in the second stanza of saws viciously biting into trees suggests the latter, or at least that he recently has been exposed to such destruction. After claiming that “the lucid and lively saws pass through dusks and dawns of times past,” the speaker hints that the damage might have been widespread, involving not only trees on neighboring streets but also those in faraway courtyards, and perhaps even near the water and beyond. The poem's final stanza is similarly ambiguous as to the range of woodlands affected. Midway through this verse, after noting the tenderness of the falling snow, the poem's speaker claims himself free to imagine the snow gracing distant conifer forests. Then, blending discussion of trees in remote sites with those on the street below, he suggests but does not say for certain that the former have met the same fate as the latter. The concluding lines of “Song of Yesterday's Snow” appear less vague. The poem's speaker states that when he goes far into the mountains the sounds of chainsaws and the cries of conifer forests being massacred—what he terms autumn's unfinished sonata—seem to him the melody of the future. But it is unclear whether he actually hears Page 182 →these sounds while in the woods, which would indicate that evergreens are being attacked even in remote spaces. Seeing trees in the mountains could simply make him think of the slaughter of those closer to home, leading him to fear for trees everywhere, including those in his new line of vision. Supporting this interpretation is the privileging of sound in this stanza to the virtual exclusion of sight. Unlike the second stanza's discussion of dying trees, which intermingles phrases on the visible with those on the audible, the exposé in the second half of the final stanza focuses entirely on sounds. The emphasis on sound in the concluding lines of this stanza also contrasts with that on sight and touch in the first half of the verse, where the poem describes the snow as softly blanketing hills and hearts. To be sure, the poem's speaker could just as easily carry into the mountains memories of sight as he could those of sound. But since he gives no indication of having encountered deforested landscapes away from home, since he does not mention witnessing the destruction or remains of a single tree, and since he does not describe the physical attributes of these spaces, it is possible that much of the damage to groves and their ecosystems is yet to come. Adding to the ambiguity about general environmental conditions are the poem's two references to “desire of the universe” (yuzhou zhi yu). Initially, the poem refers to dark green conifer forests topped with white as “a type of guide, desire of the universe” and then concludes: “massacring, destroying conifer forests ·· desire of the universe.”47 The first reference suggests that the “universe” longs for the leadership (inspiration) of trees topped with snow; groves are valued for what they can do while alive. In contrast, the second reference could mean either that conifer forests, having been destroyed, are something for which the universe (human and nonhuman alike) now longs or that the desire of the universe (people) in fact is to destroy them. As with Shang Qin's “Chicken,” Yang Mu's “Song of Yesterday's Snow” contrasts and blurs the fates of two subsets of a species, leaving unclear how much damage has been done to the species as a whole. The latter poem also raises questions about injuries to the environments this species inhabits: the poem's ambiguity about the conditions of mountains and valleys far from home and the absence of any description of these places except their blankets of snow both leave room for speculation. Yang Mu's poem “Summer,” written amid the unchecked exploitation of Taiwan's ecosystems, likewise features a landscape of indeterminate condition. But in contrast with “Song of Yesterday's Snow,” in the final line “Summer” suddenly declares ecologically compromised a space whose “greenness” it had highlighted: Page 183 → Some smoke

so much, so much green circling mosquitoes, tuberose Mr. McDonald smokes a pipe and repairs his fence. Young elm seeds falling in fragments. At some distance from the pond, full of green moss Because the woods are so deep it seems as though the great efforts of the woodpecker are drumbeats forecasting evening rain. With the exception of this, a four-acre space almost everything else is crushed nature, suffering.48 The first stanza portrays verdure as overwhelming the smoke from Mr. Mc-Donald's (Makedongna xiansheng) pipe. Smoke (yan) opens the poem, but it is only “some smoke” (yixie yan) and is quickly diluted by the second line's profusion of green (hen duo hen duo de lü). Mosquitoes circle, tuberose (lit. night fragrance, an herb of the agave family admired for its spike of fragrant white flowers) grows, and young elm seeds fall, seemingly unperturbed by the farmer and his pipe as he repairs his fence. Farther away sit a pond full of green moss (lü tai) and deep forests (shulinzi tai shen le), their soundscapes punctuated not by chainsaws, as in Yang Mu's “Song of Yesterday's Snow,” or even by the woodcutter's ax, but instead by the reverberations of a drilling woodpecker. The nonhuman appears in good shape. Then suddenly, in the final two lines of the poem, in a classic case of intratextual contradiction, the poem declares that almost everything outside Mr. McDonald's four-acre lot is “crushed nature, suffering” (jihu dou shi bing le posui de tian). As is true of many of the creative works examined in the following chapter, the role of people in bringing about this state of affairs is left unclear. Everything might be sick and crushed because of a “natural” storm, fire, or insect blight, but pesticides leaking out from the farmer's green plot also could be to blame. More significant is how the incongruity of the final two lines highlights the pitfalls of interpretation. “Summer” plays with understandings of green, particularly the color's conventional use as a sign of environmental health. The phrase “so much, so much green,” particularly following the line “some smoke,” suggests that human behaviors have had little effect on the ecosystems the poem treats; green, in other words, over-whelms human traces. This reading is reinforced in the poem's second and Page 184 → third stanzas, with their references to a pond full of green moss and deep (and presumably green) woods, respectively. Mocking expectations, the final lines of “Summer” reveal green as far more ambiguous, as potentially just as much a sign of abuse as one of health. That is to say, the green within the farmer's fence could result from extensive use of agrochemicals rather than from “natural” vigor. It is also possible, albeit unlikely, that the green spaces are flourishing in the conventional sense, but that the thriving foliage makes the poem's speaker uncomfortable, causing him to call sick and crushed what others might see as healthy. Ultimately, as in the Japanese writer Yamanoguchi Baku's poem “Mo no aru keshiki” (Scenery in Mourning, 1940), the poem speaks of nature as ailing but does not provide a specific example of this phenomenon (e.g., dying plants), instead describing only what would appear to be “healthy” ecosystems. Thus it is impossible to know just what to make of the environments in Yang Mu's text.49 “Summer” calls attention to how difficult it is to determine degrees of ecological damage and the facility with which a particular space can be interpreted as both healthy and diseased. Also noteworthy is the poem's environmental cosmopolitanism. Yang Mu's text does not specify place, and in fact, by speaking generally of mosquitoes, tuberose (native to Mexico but also prominent in Asia), elm, mossy ponds, and woodpeckers, and, even more important, featuring a farmer with the Anglo name McDonald (Makedongna; ), echoing but not to be confused with the global fast food chain McDonalds (Maidanglao, ), suggests that this scenario is not specific to Taiwan and instead could be taking place on multiple continents.

Assessing Collateral Nonhuman Damage Creative works discussing violence among people also underline the complications of evaluating damage to ecosystems by touching briefly on collateral destruction of the nonhuman. Unlike Rongzi's “The Insect World,” Shang Qin's “Chicken,” and Yang Mu's “Song of Yesterday's Snow” and “Summer,” which at once set up and undermine dichotomies between “healthy” and “damaged” bodies, many literary texts draw analogies between the abuses people inflict on one another and incidental human damage to non-human species.50 Yet references to the latter, particularly when they function primarily to reinforce the former, are often ambiguous. For instance, the Chinese writer Zheng Chouyu's poem “Canbao” (Fortress in Ruins, 1951), playing on Du Fu's “Spring View,” claims that “The guards already have gone Page 185 →home, leaving behind / a border fortress in ruins / discernable, nineteenth-century grasslands / now are a patch of sand dunes.”51 It is unclear whether battles among people or other human behaviors (as in Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem) transformed grasslands into dunes or whether this change occurred relatively independently; the poem's focus on the fate of humans and their cultural artifacts and its silence about the natural world, except for the moon in the penultimate line, leave such matters open to conjecture.52 Similarly, even though the phrase “bloodied forest” literally refers to the discoloring of an expansive ecosystem (a woodland), in a text on war that does not otherwise mention damage to the nonhuman it almost certainly serves as a metaphor for the deaths of entire regiments. “Bloodied forest” could refer simply to foliage spattered with but not drowned in human blood, or it could indicate actual damage to plants and animals: foliage drooping or dying from heavy concentrations of human blood, incidental deaths of animals such as insects and other species readily trampled upon, even the intentional mass slaughter of larger creatures. More specific examples of nonhuman suffering in writings about violence among people can invite comparable confusion. A writer might mention hearing the plaintive song of a single bird, but if this reference is not substantiated by mention of other nonhuman suffering, it too reveals more about nonhuman responses to human trauma than actual trauma to the nonhuman. Often appearing either as sweeping generalizations (a bloodied forest) or as details not placed in broader ecological context (the sorrowful cries of a single bird), these references highlight the difficulties of assessing ecodegradation in spaces of considerable human-on-human violence. This dilemma is particularly prominent in late twentieth-century war and political poetry from Korea, including Chng Hynjong's “Kwisin ch’rm” (Like a Ghost, 1989), Kim Kwanggyu's “Yuryng” (Ghosts, 1979), Ko n's “Ch’t nun” (First Snow, 1988), Pak Inhwan's “K mn kang” (Black River, 1955), and Mun Tksu's “Saebyk pada” (Dawn Sea, 1976).53 Discussions of war and other forms of human-on-human abuse predictably tend to focus on the human cost. But often just as significant for the long-term health of people and other species is the accompanying damage to the nonhuman world.54 The poems discussed below, written between the mid-1950s and late 1980s, as Korea was recovering from civil war and embarking on extraordinary industrial and urban growth, offer varying perspectives on the ambiguities of judging this damage. Although these texts focus on Korea's environments, many reach far beyond the peninsula. Chng Hynjong's “Like a Ghost”—which describes the abuse of Korean Page 186 →people under the Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan regimes—interjects several lines on the disappearance of birds into a discussion of the suffering of students and teachers whose school has been gassed. By explicitly asking not why schools are gassed but instead what has happened to the birds, the poem highlights just how much more is understood of affliction to humans than to animals, even in cases of situated damage. The traumas inflicted on people are relatively clear, the poem's speaker opening with a description of the changes to his own body: How I live like a ghost The tear gas grenade that enters, shattering the glass window inside, explodes instantly within the building transformed into a gas chamber within eyes tearing nose running

unable to see unable to breathe on the verge of suffocating Really, how I live like a ghost55 Eyes tear and the nose runs; sight, then the ability to breathe, and then consciousness are lost. The speaker somehow survives, but only as a ghost (kwisin), a spirit, a faint and shadowy trace. Soon thereafter he describes what has happened to his colleagues. One teacher bleeds from the neck, another has difficulty breathing, another develops serious allergies, and another no longer can keep down his food: “Dermatitis, rhinitis / Nose inflamed, throat inflamed, windpipe inflamed / Always short of breath, blood coming out / X-rays tried all around.”56 But at least people appear to have their beings largely intact. The text concludes with the poem's speaker seemingly resigned to his new existence as a ghost: “This must be a ghost / I will keep living this way…/ Gradually, little by little / truly you are killing me / Really, I keep living like a ghost / —It's hell if I get attached.”57 He cannot understand the reasons behind such brutal assaults. Between his account of the wreckage to his own body and to the bodies of his colleagues, the poem's speaker includes several lines, in parentheses and in prose, asking the authorities why they tore the school to shreds, why they used substances too poisonous to export to other nations, in other words, why they showed so little restraint even toward their compatriots. The reasons are clear for those familiar with Korean history—for several decades the Korean government systematically repressed suspected internal opponents of the state to preserve its own sovereignty. Page 187 → These questions are transformed later in the text by queries about the fates of animals: This spring I cannot hear the sounds of birds Where have all the naïve pheasants gone? Have the magpies all taken off? The magpies’ nests and the schoolyard are both in ruins58 Traces of the birds’ nests remain, mixed in with fragments of the shattered schoolyard, but the animals themselves have disappeared; it is uncertain even whether they were able to escape the gas attacks and now are living elsewhere, or whether they perished and their remains have become unrecognizable. Whereas the speaker has the relative luxury of asking a question to which he already knows the answer (why people were attacked so brutally), he is unaware of the present locations of the pheasants, magpies, and other birds that once nested in the schoolyard. In contrast to Kim Ch’unsu's poem “Landscape” and Xin Yu's poem “Leopard,” which explicitly question the proximate and underlying causes of ecodegradation, Chng Hynjong's “Like a Ghost” is confined to asking what has happened to the birds whose homes are now in ruins.59 Primarily concerned with the effects of gas attacks on human health and well-being, “Like a Ghost” also underlines the relative ambiguities surrounding nonhuman suffering. The text focuses on events in a specific space, the school where the speaker works, but its dearth of identifying details gives it more environmentally cosmopolitan heft than its environmental actuality would suggest. Kim Kwanggyu's seven-stanza poem “Ghosts” likewise depicts a land-scape spatially pervaded with violence, in this case kidnapping and murder. The poem's first and final verses read simply “Shh!” (; shwit), framing the verse with orders to be silent and to give the poem and the human suffering it describes undivided attention. In the first four lines of the second stanza the poem instructs people to observe the “black cars” that dash through the night and the men who “disappear” up side streets. These orders are complemented and complicated in the first five

lines of the sixth stanza by the command to “hear” the voices of corpses rotting in ponds and rising as smoke from chimneys, as well as those of bodies with mouths clenched shut; these silent voices, it is implied, are all that remain of the abductees. They are contrasted, in the final line of the sixth stanza, with the “clanging commands” of those who perpetrate violence. In the third and fifth stanzas Page 188 →the poem declares blind those who cannot see the shape of the ghosts, and deaf those who cannot hear their voices.60 “Ghosts” portrays an environment filled with the remains of tortured human bodies; the poem argues that it is the duty of the living both to “see” and to “hear” those who survive only as phantoms, whether as dust in the air, mute bodies on the ground, or decomposing corpses on the bottom of a pond. The poem includes two references to environmental pollution. In the final third of the second stanza it advises, “Look at the oil stains spread over the devastated earth / and the scraps of iron spread on every road.”61 Likewise, as stated in the fourth stanza of Kim Kwanggyu's “Ghosts,” the physical center and intellectual pivot of the poem: “Every time we breathe, infiltrating our chests / as though ultimately it will suffocate us / within flying dust and cement powder.”62 Segments of these references connect directly to the atrocities committed against people described elsewhere in the text. The “oil stains” and “scraps of iron” presumably are from the cars that abduct unsuspecting men, the subject of the first two-thirds of the second stanza; the “flying dust” is presumably from the smoke rising from burning bodies, described two stanzas later. But there is more to these references to environmental pollution. By speaking of “scraps of iron” as littering “every road” the poem most obviously underlines the frequency with which abductions take place. Yet it also points to the existence of more pervasive degradation, of ruin on a larger scale. Even more significant, the poem speaks of oil staining not the littered roads where these cars drive but instead the “devastated earth” (hwangp’yehan ttang), a much vaster space. While focusing on the atrocities committed against people, “Ghosts” also depicts the entire land-scape as ravaged. The poem does not elaborate, moving in the following stanza to discussing the (human) ghosts that haunt this land. But in the fourth stanza the poem reveals the air above as unbearably polluted, and not only from “flying dust,” the disturbingly human origins of which are revealed in the fifth stanza. The poem speaks also of flying cement powder. This powder could be residue from the chimneys mentioned in the fifth stanza. But it likely has more varied sources. As was true of the reference to polluted land, the reference to polluted air is followed in the fifth stanza by talk of the (human) ghosts that haunt this space, and then in the sixth stanza with references to extreme human-on-human abuse. On the other hand, the final line of this stanza, which is the last line of the poem, save for the final “Shh!,” orders people to heed commands rising “from a sandy wilderness without a single tree” (namu han kru mnn morae plp’an e ullyonn ch kuryng sori rl tlbora).63 It is possible that these environmental conditions have little to do with human behaviors. But considering the references Page 189 →in the second stanza to “devastated land” littered with iron and soaked with oil, and particularly the fourth stanza's depiction of air so polluted it inevitably will suffocate all who inhale it, the poem suggests that people have had a hand in shaping this bodyscape. The principal focus of “Ghosts” is violence among people, violence so common it risks going unseen and unheard. Woven into the poem's discussion of this type of brutality are fragments on damage to the nonhuman. But these ecologically confusing references give only a vague sense of environmental conditions. The poem refers to devastated earth and polluted air, yet people are the only species depicted as actually suffering. It is unclear whether any nonhuman species have been significantly harmed. More apparent is this text's environmental possibility, its applicability to any number of landscapes. Even more ambiguous than “Ghosts” and “Like a Ghost” about the impact on environments of widespread human violence is “First Snow,” a poem by Ko n, Korea's most celebrated and prolific poet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.64 Having moved from nihilistic to activist verse in the late 1970s, Ko n here appeals to the present generation, which has experienced immeasurable trauma, to abandon hatred and embrace love and life. The poem begins by asserting that the falling snow, the first of the season, implores people to stay alive: “The first snow is falling / telling this age not to die!” (Ch’t nun onda / i sidae chukchi mallago), two lines that are repeated verbatim in the closing stanza.65 “First Snow” mixes references to past abuses inflicted on Koreans—including arrests, imprisonment, and even the division of their peninsula—with allusions to present emotions that themselves risk further harming human communities. But the poem also indicates that there has been significant damage to Korea's nonhuman world. After the two lines cited above, the first stanza continues: “The first snow is

falling / So much to do / on this bruised homeland of mountains and water / the first snow is falling.” And the final stanza of “First Snow” follows “The first snow is falling / telling this age not to die!” with “Telling this home-land of rivers and mountains / to breathe fully.” The line “on this bruised homeland of mountains and waters” (san i go mul in mngdn kangsan e) is usually read metaphorically, the suffering as entirely human. The homeland, synonymous with rivers and mountains—the term kangsan (), made up of the characters for river and mountain —is snapped () at the waist (kangsan challin hri), but it is the people, not the physical landscapes that suffer. Collateral damage to Korea's ecosystems is undeniably significant. But concerns are marginalized and conditions of ecosystems left ambiguous. “First Snow” itself points much more to the “new” nonhuman (i.e., the snow) as healer of both people and nature; the poem depicts snow falling Page 190 →on people, prisons, battlegrounds, hills, and water in addition to instructing people and the land. Whereas Chng Hynjong's “Like a Ghost,” Kim Kwanggyu's “Ghosts,” and Ko n's “First Snow” are less ambiguous concerning the condition of people than that of the nonhuman, texts such as Mun Tksu's “Dawn Sea” and Pak Inhwan's “Black River” are notably circumspect about the status of both. The speaker of “Black River”—written in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War by a poet known in part for his engagement with Western literatures and anxiety vis-à-vis modern civilization and war—is sitting on a train he describes as “headed in the opposite direction of those going toward death.”66 In other words, he is departing from a space of imminent or actual destruction. But he does not elaborate on the experiences of new arrivals to this place, commenting only: “A peasant's son lacking even a facial expression / leaving for land of life and death filled / with explosion and gunsmoke.” Later in the poem he again mentions encountering spaces of death, claiming that a “fortress of freedom / brought about by the blood of human beings / had no connection with those like us in retreat.”67 The speaker specifies that the blood sacrificed is human, but he says no more about the suffering of these individuals. Mention of nonhuman destruction is just as ambiguous. The reference to air pollution via gunsmoke in the third stanza is echoed by the comment in the fourth that “the moon is more dreary than quiet”; in this context a “dreary moon” easily could be one seen through a shroud of smoke. Likewise, the poem's final line echoes its title, suggesting that the river has been polluted by the same smoke that suffused the airspace above the peasant's land: “We saw in that moon / the gloomy black river flowing” (uri nn ch tal sok e / amdamhan kmn kang i hrnn ksl poatta).68 The land and air clearly have been polluted, but the damage to the inhabitants of these spaces remains unclear; the speaker's escape from the hardest-hit areas suggests that it will be some time before questions about the conditions of human and nonhuman bodies in these spaces can be answered. Even more circumspect about these matters is Mun Tksu's poem “Dawn Sea.” This brief verse—written by a poet known for his portrayals of bleak urban and rural landscapes and criticized for allowing ecological concerns to take precedence over celebrations of the peninsula's beauty—features a “ripened” ocean that is “sizzling, seething, like crabapples” (nnggm ch’rm ign pada).69 Causing this turmoil are volleys of bullets emanating from the edge of the water, bullets that transform the sea into a hole-riddled hive. The morning light reflects off the rounds and the fissures they create; the former are described as “many / suns / springing out from the edge of the sea / like tiny balls” that transform the ocean, now “studded with sun,” Page 191 →into a “casket of jewels.” It is doubtful that anything near the surface of the water can survive. In this poem life exists only in simile, the bullets likened to “animals / stampeding driven in / driven out.” But the actual damage inflicted on ecosystems is ambiguous. The poem's equating the ocean with a cornucopia of seething crabapples suggests that it might be bloodied, and thus that people and marine animals have been injured or killed. On the other hand, crabapples come in many colors, from near purples and bright reds to red-oranges, yellows, and greens. Unlike Pak Inhwan's “Black River,” which speaks explicitly of human blood as well as human and nonhuman death, Mun Tksu's poem does not specify whether bodies have bled, much less perished. Ecosystems clearly have been reshaped, but the poem's focus on the sea's new color, texture, and luminosity as contrasted with its silence on the damage done leaves much room for speculation. Writings on war and other forms of human-on-human violence frequently address both intentional and incidental damage to nonhuman environments. Many, like those examined above, highlight the relative ambiguities that surround the conditions of the natural world. By adopting an environmentally cosmopolitan stance, at least in part, they emphasize the ubiquity of these phenomena; the texts in this section discuss conditions in Korea in the 1950s

to the 1980s, without being confined to that time or place. Needless to say, no single text, particularly not a poem, can address every aspect of human and nonhuman devastation. Most discourse in fact raises more questions than it answers. But writings by Chng Hynjong, Kim Kwanggyu, Ko n, Pak Inhwan, Mun Tksu, and many others stand out because of their complex and varied negotiations with this environmental uncertainty. One could attribute these poems’ references to ecodegradation as simply reinforcing depictions of human suffering. Yet ultimately such texts call for more nuanced readings. Devastation of the nonhuman might occur incidentally to that of human beings, but its consequences are rarely incidental.

Questioning Nonhuman Resilience A common trope in many literatures is to contrast the relative resilience (endurance and revivability) of the nonhuman, whether individual species or the nonhuman more generally, with the ephemerality of people and their cultural artifacts. Numerous texts that establish this dichotomy allude to or even highlight nonhuman endurance in the face of human transformation of environments.70 Narratives often call attention to those parts of the nonhuman that withstand or recuperate from damage imposed by people, and Page 192 →those that exhibit resilience in the face of blizzards, typhoons, and shifting tectonic plates. Yet many of these writings, despite their seeming optimism about the prospects of the nonhuman, in fact leave ambiguous how long their endurance can last. Doing so both explicitly and more subtly are the Korean writer Mun Tksu's poem “Yangsim” (Conscience, 2002); the Korean writer Ko n's poem “I ttang e ajikdo saemi itta” (In This Land There Still Are Springs, 1986); the Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong's poem “Xishuai he jiguanqiang” (Crickets and Machine Guns, 1978); and the Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko's novel Tenko (Lake of Heaven, 1997). Whereas Mun Tksu's and Ko n's texts raise questions about timetables of endurance, and Yu Guangzhong's poem interweaves uncertainties concerning endurance and recuperation, Ishimure's novel for the most part interrogates scenarios of nonhuman revivability. Mun Tksu's deceptively simple poem “Conscience” features spatially pervasive damage. An anonymous landscape has been torn apart by a typhoon (not unusual in Korea) and sparkles with beer cans: The typhoon pulled up the acacia tree by its roots, knocked it over, and broke a poplar, its neighboring friend, in half. It nicely combed down even the thick roadside grasses and shrubs. But empty aluminum beer cans glitter in the bushes. “Scoundrels!” it shouts.71 “Conscience” first highlights nonhuman strength, speaking straightforwardly of a typhoon that not only uprooted and split apart trees but also reshaped sturdy roadside grasses and shrubs. But ironically, as the poem moves from larger to smaller foliage, questions as to the real strength of this storm begin to surface. The fifth line remarks that empty aluminum beer cans clutter the bushes. To be sure, the poem does not specify how many cans there are or when or how the cans were deposited. The presence of empty beer cans in the bushes after a typhoon suggests simple littering: people should of course be recycling their aluminum cans (the poem was written after recycling protocols were implemented), but perhaps the storm blew in cans tossed else-where, or people passing by the bushes after the storm threw their trash into these plants. Such actions, particularly the former, complicate the poem's early endorsements of nonhuman strength and play up the stubborn tenacity of human artifacts. Although the winds are stronger than the cans, the cans Page 193 →emerge stronger than the trees: trees are explicitly torn apart, while cans appear to remain intact. Not only are they not disposed of as they should be, they circulate through the landscape, weather patterns aiding and abetting their journeys.

Undermining more seriously the poem's early references to nonhuman strength is the possibility that some of the cans were deposited in the bushes before the typhoon and rode out the storm there, implying that some human artifacts are so deeply imbedded among plants that they cannot be displaced even by violent storms. The poem does not indicate that these cans have changed anything other than the appearance of the bushes. Uncertain is how much longer this will be the case—how much trash landscapes will be able to support, and for how long. Mun T ksu's poem depicts an environment heretofore altered far more by a nonhuman phenomenon (a typhoon) than by human actions (littering).72 At the same time, this text reveals people making an imprint on even the most naturally devastated landscape; it appears as though even a typhoon cannot liberate plants from their anthropogenic burden. And by leaving so much unsaid, the poem raises questions as to how long environments can resist human incursion; the broad scope of this poem's informational ambiguity deepens its import. For now, “Conscience” suggests, human debris is confined to the bushes; moreover, although the appearance of the roadside has been altered, the changes appear mostly cosmetic. But when something seemingly as powerful as a typhoon is reduced to shouting “Scoundrels!” (inomdl), referring most obviously to the cans but also perhaps to the bushes for allowing the cans to nestle within them, and when this accusation concludes the poem, doubt is cast on the strength of the natural world. Unlike Mu Dksu's “Conscience,” where nonhuman phenomena have retained considerable power even as this strength is questioned, Ko n's “In This Land” features a landscape ravaged by warfare and industrial pollution. This poem highlights the endurance of Korea's people and nonhuman bodies. Although the speaker is optimistic that Korea is or soon will be a “new nation” (sae nara) and a “new world” (sae sesang), the poem's silence about the future of the land's ecosystems suggests that it might be in jeopardy. Even more revealing are the repeated assertions, beginning in the title, that Korea still (ajikdo) contains miles of clear, fresh, flowing water. The adverb still emphasizes continuity between past and present, accompanied in some sense by wonder at this continuity. In this way it highlights the tenacity of the natural world. But it also invites questioning about continuity between present and future. The springs remain in motion, but for how much longer? “In This Land” begins with a celebration of Korea's long heritage, highlighting Page 194 →the fluidity and endurance of its natural wonders: “Here and there along the shores of Cheju Island there are springs…/ That water flows and flows underground until it spurts up…/ [In a valley of Mount Munsu] there exists a spring, as innocent as a child / There exists a spring that flows from beneath the frozen earth / Millennia of history! / In this land there still are springs.”73 We begin on the country's largest island, a beautiful province off its southwestern coast created from volcanic eruptions and regarded by many as the Korean Hawai‘i. The text quickly moves beneath the surface of both earth and water, telling the reader that there are various freshwater springs (saem) sprinkled along the shore; the lines that follow note that these springs are visible in the ebbing tide, but even during high tide, they continue to flow, defying gravity as they reach the surface and spurt forth. Ko n's poem then moves to Mount Munsu (east-central Korea), declaring that here too springs flow, innocently as a child. All appears peaceful and eternal. But immediately after declaring “in this land there still are springs,” echoing its title verbatim, the poem declares, “Snapped land injured land / trampled land” (challin ttang mngdn ttang / chitpalp’in ttang).74 Like “First Snow,” written two years later, “In This Land” uses the adjective challida (be snapped, i.e., divided) to describe Korea. While the waters flow as before, the land has been harmed in various ways. Using the word ttang (lit. earth, ground, land), rather than sesang (world) or nara (country) as it does in later stanzas, the poem emphasizes the destruction wrought on Korea's biophysical environments. The following five lines continue in this vein, highlighting nonhuman endurance, retaining the distinction between living water and suffering land, but emphasizing the endurance of the latter and its people. The first, second, and fourth of these five lines describe damage to land and air—skies reddened by industrial smog, spring drought, and soil poisoned by heavy metals—while the third and fifth speak of a continuing revolution and imprisoned workers and students. Each of these lines concludes with the introductory nonfinal ending -n [-n, nn] de (), which here gives the sense of “even though” (e.g., “even though the skies are red with chemical smog [kwanghwahak smog]”). Following these five lines is the refrain “In this land there still are springs.” The opening paeans to the Korean landscape here are transformed into evidence of its endurance.

This refrain is followed by two revealing questions: “How can gushing water rot? / How can flowing water die? ”75 In a way these questions are rhetorical, the poem implying that it would be impossible for Korea's springs either to decay or to perish; after all, they already have showcased their ability to withstand disaster. But in Ko n's poem such queries, left un-addressed, have bleak undertones. Rather than giving an answer, the poem Page 195 →quickly switches topics, declaring “Yes / this land has people who fight / fighting people / your words are always fresh and confident / Strangely / your words have no hypocrisy.”76 Trading pure gushing springs for pure gushing people, and explicitly declaring them always already to be this way, the poem redirects attention from the nation's waters. Water serves as a metaphor, its resilience and wholesomeness obvious signs of these characteristics within the Korean population. The poem praises the tireless, honest struggles of Korea's students and the endless sincere protests of its workers before elaborating again on the nation's freshwater springs. But as in the opening section of “In This Land,” these lines are followed by the refrain, “In this land there still are springs.”77 In contrast, the next line reads, “This land has fights.” By including the adverb still the poem again calls attention both to the water's resilience and to its possible vulnerability, at least in contrast with the Korean fighters it otherwise resembles; the absence of still in its reference to Korea's fighters is noteworthy considering the poem's earlier mention of Koreans having fought steadily for the past thirty years. These are the last words on Korea's waters; the poem concludes with the claim that so long as people fight, This land is certainly a new world [i ttang n kip’ilk’o sae sesang ida] This land [i ttang n] a new nation, that nation [sae nara k nara ro] with other nations together is a new world [nam i nara wa hamkke sae sesang ida]78 As its title and opening lines suggest, Ko n's poem focuses primarily on Korea. But this final reference to the new world of Korea joining with other nations as a new world (i.e., planet) is an explicit expression of interdependence.79 Korea's political future is depicted as tied deeply to the futures of other nations; its ecological future is similarly intertwined but more ambiguous. Likewise overrun with human violence is the landscape featured in the Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong's “Crickets and Machine Guns.” Focusing on the fate of crickets, this poem by one of Taiwan's many cosmopolitan writers, written before the swelling of Taiwanese environmental consciousness, questions the resilience of animals.80 Whether this resilience takes the form primarily of endurance or of regeneration is not clear: the poem speaks not of the death of crickets but of their silence, which could indicate their demise, their momentary stillness, or the temporary obscuring Page 196 →of their ongoing song by the clamor of machine guns. “Crickets and Machine Guns” draws attention to the frequently disregarded collateral damage to the natural world that often accompanies human carnage. This focus is accentuated by the poem's featuring the human/nonhuman battle as one between small insects and powerful weapons intended to kill people, rather than between more obvious antagonists including insecticides and crickets or hunting rifles and large mammals. By spotlighting a less likely but possibly more lethal battle the poem alludes to the multilayered character of much damage to the nonhuman. “Crickets and Machine Guns” begins with the curious question, “In debates between crickets and machine guns, which side loses, and which side wins?”81 The answer is not surprising: “Of course it's the machine guns that win.” The lines that follow explain why this is the case; these weapons possess “fierce and speedy eloquence,” “trenchant tongues of fire,” and “glorious teeth that dazzle people,” all of which have until now made them “debate champions.” Yu Guangzhong's text personifies weapons and likens the struggles between machine guns and animals to a verbal debate. It rein-forces this analogy by referring to the magnificence of the guns’ eloquence, tongues, and teeth. In so doing, it effectively dissolves distinctions between people and their cultural artifacts. This poem also points to the power of verbal discourse, suggesting that people's words are perhaps just as intimidating as their weapons. It seems there is little hope for crickets; the following lines explain that even mountains appear to cower before people and their weapons: “Whenever the guns open their mouths, they cause a sensation, the

masses of mountains all answering / Ta-ta-ta, everywhere / Echoing hollowly, unceasingly, like applause.” But then, itself mimicking so many other creative works, “Crickets and Machine Guns” suggests that crickets, and the nonhuman more generally, not only have a chance but also can triumph over such weapons. The final third of the poem claims that there are times when the crickets’ leisurely voices rise above the graves of heroes, that they chant clearly among the foxtails, and that they “talk to the night, so deep in thought.” Moreover, the text concludes, “perhaps singers endure longer than sharpshooters / machine guns use screams to prove their existence / crickets use only stillness.” Perhaps, but not necessarily. The poem offers caveats nearly sufficient to dismiss these suppositions as pure fantasy, caveats that together form the middle third of the text. Yu Guangzhong's verse declares that crickets are silent unless gunsmoke disperses, gun barrels cool, and weapons point blankly into the void; unless echoes suddenly stop, and gun shells fall to the ground. In other words, crickets are only audible after “the powerful eloquence [of Page 197 →the machine guns] shuts up.” Yet are these weapons ever quiet? Individual spaces enjoy reprieves, many of which are long-lasting and unquestionably overshadow relatively brief moments of violence. But, speaking solely of machine guns in mountains, Yu Guangzhong's poem is pointedly ambiguous about the location of the events it describes. If the poem refers to multiple mountain regions where fighting occurs, then the possibility of nonhuman resilience is greatly diminished. Lines in the final part of “Crickets and Machine Guns” provide a vision of hope, creating an enticing scene of gunfighting brought to an end, of war as only a memory, one that is vanishing slowly beneath gravestones encircled by thriving plants. On the other hand, surrounding discourse deeply confuses such a vision. This includes the poem's final lines: jiguanqiang zhengming ziji de cunzai, yong huxiao / xishuai jinjin yong jijing. That machine guns have to “use screams” (yong huxiao) to prove their existence while insects need only “use silence” (yong jijing) points to the greater legitimacy of the nonhuman; nature exists simply by being and has no need actually to do anything, except, ironically, keep quiet. Yet its characteristic silence, at least when surrounded by the clamor of weapons/people, also threatens to mask its disappearance and leave its actual existence—and its revivability—uncertain. “Crickets and Machine Guns” declares machine guns victorious and complicates the futures (revivability) of their insect opponents. Japanese environmental activist and writer Ishimure's novel Lake of Heaven further questions nonhuman resilience by depicting the struggles of nature in sites that have been greatly altered by people but whose greatest changes have resulted from nonhuman phenomena—a typhoon and tectonic plate shifting, respectively.82 While Mun Tksu's “Conscience” points simply to the tenacity of the human footprint amid tropical cyclones, Lake of Heaven speaks at length of the actual damage people can do even to an environment shaped by powerful nonhuman phenomena. Within this context it reveals the uncertainty surrounding the revivability of the natural world. And while Yu Guangzhong's poem casts doubt on the mere possibility of regenerating, the Japanese novel, which features successful nonhuman revitalization, casts doubt on prospects for repeating this revival. Written in 1997, three decades after Ishimure's Sea of Suffering and in a nation and world of increasingly threatened ecosystems, Lake of Heaven describes the visit of Masahiko, a young Tokyo composer, to what remains of his grandfather Masahito's hometown of Amazoko (lit. bottom of heaven), a village in Kyushu that thirty years earlier was buried under a lake created by a dam. Amazoko is fictional, but it is modeled after the actual Kyushu village Mizukami, submerged by the Ichifusa Dam, which was built in 1960 Page 198 →ironically to control flooding and generate power along the Kuma River in Kumamoto Prefecture. Not surprisingly, the Ichifusa and other dam projects in the area have been controversial; protests surrounding the Kawabegawa Dam (located on an upstream section of the Kuma River) have postponed its completion for several decades. On the other hand, in 2004 workers began dismantling the Arase Dam, also located on the Kuma River, in part because of opposition from local residents inspired by Ishimure's writings.83 Lake of Heaven has rightly been described by Gary Snyder and others as mythopoetical, incorporating as it does tales, dreams, myths, Noh drama, poetry, and song as well as more straightforward narration. The novel speaks explicitly of the power of words, of kotodama ( lit. word spirit), as “born of the union [gattai] of things such as morning light and the plants of the hills and fields”; the novel calls residents of Amazoko “people in a kind of ancient epic poem” (Amazoko no hitotachi wa sonna kodai jojishi no naka no hitotachi da). Ishimure's text celebrates rural peoples, the natural world in which they are enmeshed, and the power of the language used to

evoke both.84 The novel's vivid, magnetic images captivate even its most casual readers, underscoring all that has and will continue to be lost as nations reshape ecosystems ever more dramatically; the text also highlights the incredible resilience of both people and the natural world. Ishimure's narrator describes the villagers as quickly embracing Masahiko, who is deeply impressed both by their rich spiritual lives and by the healthy and abundant natural world—including trees, rivers, and mountains—that physically and audibly permeates their communities. Lake of Heaven vividly exposes the great traumas to both people and nature that the dam has inflicted. But the novel also raises questions about the ability of ecosystems to withstand human manipulation. People have irrevocably transformed Amazoko's landscapes, and many of the immediate changes are described as having been quite painful. Yet the narrator gives little indication that this landscape remained ravaged for long; in fact, it is repeatedly described as a space of great harmony and beauty, one that inspires Masahiko's musical compositions. Even the novel's title suggests nonhuman triumph over extensive human manipulation of ecosystems: the lake (tenko) behind the dam is one of heaven, not of hell. While condemning significant human shaping of environments, such as damming rivers, Lake of Heaven seemingly unwittingly highlights the relatively rapid recovery of the nonhuman in Japan's rural areas.85 In contrast, city lands have not fared so well; Ishimure's novel sharply condemns the air and noise pollution plaguing Japan's urban spaces, depicting metropolitan ecosystems as far worse off than those of rural areas. The Page 199 →ambiguity lies in just how much human interference landscapes can endure. Lake of Heaven addresses two extremes of transformed ecosystems: those that after an initial period of adjustment regain their health and flourish (spaces, including the lake, that are barricaded by concrete, as well as the areas surrounding these spaces) and those that because of the density of their human population are seemingly beyond repair (spaces, such as cities, that are covered in concrete). Ishimure's novel is more precise about both the division and the integration of these spaces than are texts such as Rongzi's “Insect World,” which is ambiguous as to the extent the “insect world, ” somewhere supposedly separate from the “human world,” has already been affected by it. Because the dam and new lake constantly exemplify human transformation of environments, the narrator and characters of Lake of Heaven harbor no fantasies that rural Japan has been left untouched. More confusing is how much longer rural Japan, or at least that part of it closest to the nation's expanding metropolitan areas, will be able to withstand such large-scale human projects. Ishimure's novel emphasizes the high human cost of inundating Amazoko. Not only did most villagers lose their homes, but gambling and financial mismanagement followed on the heels of dam construction with money designated for relocation falling into the wrong hands and impoverishing many. More significant, the deep attachment and sense of loss many former residents, including Masahiko's grandfather, feel toward the “village at the bottom of the lake” do not erode with time; for some the memories are an obsession and constant source of grief. Visiting this lake, Masahiko is surprised to find that he too is moved: “All the places about which his grandfather had told him—the Hall of Kannon, the monkey-seat rock, Oki no Miya—where were they submerged? Trees, scattered here and there, were the only things visible at the bottom of the water; the only thing he understood was that there was the site of village. His heart was attacked by a crushing sensation. He hadn't expected to feel this way.”86 On the other hand, many of the former residents of Amazoko have found new purpose in life: “Masahiko felt as though among these people death was not extinction. They say our generation is one of loss and ruin and that our mode is nihilism. But it appears as though these people of Amazoko, who have lost their village, have revived the meaning of existence.”87 Much of the nonhuman also has recovered from the traumas inflicted on this landscape. Lake of Heaven highlights the devastation caused by the dam: the narrative includes numerous graphic descriptions of the merciless submerging of everything from grand and beloved trees to small and helpless insects: Page 200 → All the flowering clover, the Chinese milk vetch, and the innumerable sweet flowerings of violets that grew along the ravines and ridges of the field—everything was flooded together. For a moment, even when in the water, the scene looked as though it were one of living vegetation. What most surprised

everyone was the variety of insects, creatures that usually were overlooked, floating everywhere on the surface of the water. Ants large and small, molting light-green dreamy small butterflies, with their wings, thinner than paper, torn apart were floating. Mole crickets were swimming, lizards too were swimming. Even tiny baby birds that appeared as though they’d just hatched were floating in their nests…Together with the insects, which seemed as though they were burning in hell, the villagers felt as though they too were being exterminated before they even knew what was happening.88

Unlike in Yu Guangzhong's “Crickets and Machine Guns,” where insects confronted with volleys of gunfire are simply described as persisting in speechlessness and silence, Ishimure's narrator vividly describes the painful physical mutilation of these animals’ bodies. The seemingly thoughtless flooding of their ecosystems is contrasted with the villagers’ more respectful plowing of the land. As Oshizu reminisces: When they started letting in water, around the time that Ssuke's field of Chinese milk vetch was submerged, inordinate numbers of green caterpillars and mole crickets bubbled up from beneath the grass. Everyone gasped when they saw this. The insects were floating, covering the surface of the water [mizu no ue ippai], choking us up. I've never forgotten that scene. Oh, just think, when we built these fields, we held proper memorial services for the insects. There is a stone monument on the hill in the cemetery with the words “memorial for the souls of the ten thousand beings.” By “ten thousand beings” they didn't mean just people. The stone monument on the hill dedicated to the ten thousand beings was meant not just for the insects and the birds; it was also for the souls of things we can't see, things that protect the village. Our ancestors built it for this reason.89 Oshizu reveals not only her own conflicting attitudes, condoning the killing of flora and fauna for agriculture while condemning their killing for the sake of a dam that likewise aims to make human lives more comfortable. She also exposes contradictions between the attitudes and behaviors of her predecessors, Page 201 →namely the conflict between their killing and honoring a vast array of nonhuman beings. This rural landscape has a long history of human habitation and manipulation—not only have local peoples long been farming here, but well before the dam was built, forest fires and a French lumber mill polluted the region and triggered landslides. But the dam caused unprecedented damage. Even so, thirty years after the dam was built the ecosystems Masahiko encounters show few if any signs of degradation. Looking at the lake for the first time, Masahiko notes that, far from being a polluted cesspool, “the submerged village has been made into a gathering place for fish.”90 The water is clear and peaceful, so much so that some residents seem to believe that “this manmade lake, constructed taking full advantage of modern technology, was like a transparent cocoon that contained within it the chrysalis and silkworms that the sleeping ancient village had become.”91 And surrounding the lake the soil is rich and fragrant, the foliage luxurious, the air filled with birdsong, and the mountains magical. Masahiko and the narrator can barely contain their excitement. The region is occasionally afflicted by droughts, but these are infrequent, do not seem to be human-induced, and do not cause lasting damage. In fact, much greater than the difference between the pre- and postconstruction landscapes is the gap between rural and urban areas, a dynamic often overlooked in critical discussions of Lake of Heaven, which understandably focus on the disruption to rural lives, both human and nonhuman. The narrator and Masahiko frequently contrast rural and urban sites, almost always to the detriment of the latter. Masahiko is particularly captivated by the sounds heard in the mountains and in what remains of Amazoko. Listening to the winds along the shore of the lake, All the cacophony [] of that frenzied city [; i.e., Tokyo] vanished [] from around him. The grating noises of cars [], the sound of brakes [], the noises of shutters opening and closing [] that had eaten down to the marrow of his bones. Street noises [ ]—things constantly being torn up and smashed down—had all vanished [ ]. What kind of world was that? Could it be that I've been carried off by the energy of the cacophony [] of that giant city [; i.e., Tokyo] and made a soft landing here?92

four lines—its omnipresence and Page 202 →omnipotence, its ability to infiltrate the skin and, like the chemicals Ishimure describes in Sea of Suffering, eat down to the marrow of the bones (hone no zui made kuiitteita). Also striking is the healing power of the landscape: the narrator describes not so much the presence of these sounds within Masahiko's body as their absence. They once had penetrated the very core of his body, but they have since disappeared, the narrator concluding the first two sentences translated above with the verb “vanished” (kiete ita; ). Later in the novel the narrator again remarks on how the sounds of trains and trucks would interrupt conversations in the city between Masahiko and his grandfather, and on the sharp disparity between the forest of thriving andromeda trees not far from the buried village and Masahiko's own tiny potted andromeda, covered in soot, that wilted not long after his grandfather's death. Tokyo is so cacophonous, Masahiko reflects, that the cries of roosters are audible only in zoos. Not long after arriving in the village he comes to think of the “breaking, rapidly swelling Tokyo as a giant cancer cell.”93 The ground on which Tokyo is built and the air above the city are not the only spaces implicated. Nearly all of Japan appears at risk. The narrator comments that the Japanese islands have become “a conveyor belt carrying concrete scabs, all covered with swarms of shuddering vehicles.”94 Complaining that people do their best to disregard the machines removing the very earth that once nurtured them, the narrator asks, “Doesn't it seem as though a giant, invisible hand is stretching out and grasping the epidermis, or rather even the dermis beneath it, of the densely populated area of this archipelago, and peeling it away?”95 The ecosystems around the former Amazoko have thus far been relatively spared. In fact, in the first chapter— unlike in Sea of Suffering where as discussed in Chapter 2 the narrator declares that a “deep, fissure-like pathway…ran the length of the Japanese archipelago”96— Masahiko declares that except for the dam this region has “no straight line of human construction.”97 But the dramatic image of hands grasping the epidermis of the Japanese islands ready to peel it away indicates that environmental devastation is hardly confined to a few select spaces. New roads are gradually infiltrating areas around Amazoko, and although they so far have successfully blended into the mountainsides, and their vibrations have stayed in tune with those of the earth's skin, at least in Masahiko's interpretation, there soon will come a time when these roads are no longer so inconspicuous. Interestingly, Masahiko initially had been disturbed that the land was gashed to build the new road, but now he believes these changes nicely complement those the terrain inflicts on itself in the form of volcanoes, shifting land masses, and the like.98 Needless to say, it is such changes in attitudes—from being troubled by the human reshaping of the mountainside to Page 203 →believing such transformations complement millions of years of nonhuman upheaval—that allow for increased human manipulation of environments. The elaborate discussion of the geological history of the region suggests that Masahiko and the narrator feel somewhat uneasy about justifying human activity in this manner. Although Lake of Heaven in many places highlights the parallels between the pre- and postconstruction landscapes and underlines the differences between Japan's cities and its mountain regions, the novel also makes clear that the latter are in jeopardy. These landscapes have for the most part withstood and overcome the changes people inflict, but their resilience cannot endure forever. Creative texts such as the prominent Korean ecopoet Ch’oe Sngho's “Tamjaengi tnggul e hwipssain puldoj” (Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy Vines, 2000) depict the bulldozers that reshape the landscapes writers from Ishimure to John Steinbeck describe, as well as the people whose lifestyles are made possible by these bulldozers, as at the mercy of rain, wind, and ravenous vegetation.99 “Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy Vines” opens with rain and wind rusting out iron; the poem concludes on a similar note: “The ivy vines, with their sticky hands / wind around the bulldozer, and blazing under the sun / are ready to gnaw on the scrap iron.” Here it is not machines or their byproducts penetrating human and nonhuman bodies but instead the nonhuman eating away at human artifacts. These interactions are evidence of nonhuman potency; most human mechanical and chemical products, even those exceptionally harmful to the nonhuman, eventually disintegrate in its grasp and become part of it. This means that the very landscape ravaged by a bulldozer could one day devour this machine and that the adaptability of the natural world cannot be underestimated. Indeed, as the quotation from Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest cited earlier in this chapter indicates, even literature focusing on massive human destruction of environments emphasizes that much of the nonhuman ultimately survives, albeit often in changed configurations. For its part Ibuse Masuji's novel Kuroi ame (Black Rain, 1966), regarded by some as Japan's foremost work of atomic bomb literature, comments on the untimely deaths of Kokutaiji's ancient camphors: “They were said to be

more than one thousand years old, but today had been brought to an end.”100 On the other hand, like much Japanese literature of the atomic bomb, this narrative also remarks on the speed with which the flora and fauna of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reappear; Black Rain defies assertions made directly after the bombings that it would be decades before anyone or anything could live in these cities. Surveying the ruins of Hiroshima, the novel's protagonist remarks, “This bomb was fostering the growth of plants and flies while increasing the power that deters Page 204 →the essence of humanity. Flies and plants were raging unbelievably.”101 But far from offering solace, or justification, these altered dynamics complicate evaluating patterns of nonhuman resilience. Imagining similar scenarios, many have argued that the continued existence of human society is far more precarious than that of nonhuman life on the planet because the earth is still able to withstand whatever people do to it and to themselves. People's behaviors, it is said, put at tremendous risk not the planet's survival but their own. In contrast, Mun Tksu's “Conscience,” Ko n's “In This Land,” Yu Guangzhong's “Crickets and Machine Guns,” and especially Ishimure Michiko's Lake of Heaven suggest that nonhuman resilience is at best ambiguous; these works invite us to reconsider familiar tropes of nonhuman permanence, broadly speaking, as well as of human impermanence. To distinguish among parts of the nonhuman, or even between these “parts” and the “planet,” is an uncertain exercise. Damage to one nonhuman species affects the condition of countless others of greater and lesser significance; when this damage is replicated in another site (e.g., similar dams built in rivers at some distance from one another), when it stretches to multiple regions, the number of affected species can increase exponentially. In the end, Ishimure's narrator suggests, the very epidermis of the earth is peeled away, the planet itself tortured mercilessly.

Ambiguous Futures Closely related to creative works that question the resilience of ecosystems are narratives that point to the confusion surrounding both human and non-human futures in the face of impending and severe environmental damage. Such ambiguous texts, a subset of environmental apocalypse narratives, depict ecological disaster as inevitable and in some cases imminent. On the other hand, unlike many apocalyptic writings that describe in great detail the future that awaits, not to mention those—such as the American author Cormac McCarthy's best-selling The Road (2006)—that actually are set in such a future, the texts examined in this section remain notably ambiguous about the conditions that follow disaster.102 They do so by forecasting out-comes through broad generalizations, conflicting information, or silence. The tension between certainty (of occurrence) and uncertainty (of resulting conditions) is responsible for much of the intra- and extratextual anxiety about environmental futures articulated in these creative works. This tension penetrates texts as varied as the Chinese émigré writer Wang Ping's short story Page 205 →“Maverick” (2007) and the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao's poems “Itsuka” (Someday, 1995) and “21 seiki ni wa” (In the 21st Century, 1996). Written in English, “Maverick” is the final selection of Wang Ping's anthology The Last Communist Virgin.103 It is one of many recent Chinese creative works that address the high environmental price of the Three Gorges Dam.104 Wang Ping's story takes place on June 6, 2006; it begins six hours before and concludes six seconds before the demolition of the Three Gorges Dam's cofferdam, the temporary barrier against the Yangzi River used during construction that, when removed, unleashed the full force of the river on the new dam.105 Although narrated in the early twenty-first century and anticipating an imminent event, the bulk of “Maverick” consists of reiterations of ancient Chinese myths, legends, and folklore; background on Wushan, a county on the northeastern tip of Chongqing municipality, Sichuan Province, that was flooded by the Three Gorges Dam; and flashbacks to the principal narrator Wu Pan's childhood experiences in the now flooded town of Wushan, including his interactions with family, friends, fish, and Red Guards (the “vanguard” of the Cultural Revolution, the young men and women Mao Zedong sent to attack their elders and other counterrevolutionaries).106 The story also devotes significant space to the story of Shan Gui (Mountain Spirit), not the elusive hill wraith in the lyric of the same name by the Chu statesman Qu Yuan, but instead a massive Chinese sturgeon that Wu Pan caught thirty-six years earlier.107 After being pulled from the water, the sturgeon took on various guises, including those of a beautiful woman and a fish waging a hunger strike because of its confinement in a tank in Beijing; the fish even narrates part of “Maverick.” By devoting most of its space to past events and employing a nonhuman narrator on occasion, Wang Ping's story provides multiple perspectives on the myriad parts of the natural world likely to be or already

significantly affected by the dam and other human reshaping of environments. But setting Wang Ping's story apart from most other narratives that address ecodegradation—including many that speak of the devastation caused by or expected from the Three Gorges Dam—is its methodical countdown to devastation that will be anything but methodical; ruin is certain to be followed by even greater chaos, the timing and nature of which are highly uncertain. Framing “Maverick” is a sequence leading to demolition. The story begins with an epithet on wizards gathering herbs on Soul Mountain from the Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a principal source of Chinese mythology that combines fragments of ethnography and natural history with folklore from shamanistic visions.108 This is followed by: “This is it, Shan Gui Page 206 →[mountain spirit], June 6, 2006. In six hours, the Coffer Dam will explode. The river will rush in and we’ll all go under…In six hours the river will rise to the red mark—175 meters, and everything will go—the gorge, the slopes, the mist, and our home under the dawn redwood. The river will become a lake: tame, servile, worthless.”109 Six pages later Shan Gui announces, “In six hours when the Coffer Dam blows up and the water rises, everything along the river will go—the fields, the roads, the villages, the cities, the mountains, and our water fir.”110 With about a page to go before the end of the story, the narrator declares, “The time has come, Shan Gui. In six minutes, the river will rise to the red mark on the trunk.”111 The countdown ticking, on the final page the narrator states: “It [the river] has six seconds to go. In six seconds, the river will no longer be.”112 The lines that follow this declaration and bring “Maverick” to a close take more than six seconds to read: But it will never die. At your grave I wait. When the hot wind blows in from the North Pole, the sea will rise like mountains, shattering every chain [dam] on the river's throat and limbs. And you, my mountain spirit, will come home in your original form, free, naked.113 The cofferdam thus implodes—or is imagined as imploding—as the reader is finishing the story. Yet these concluding sentences not only point to washing away the Yangzi's countless dams, which Shan Gui earlier had described as numbering in the tens of thousands, essentially clogging the “artery of my home.”114 The final lines of “Maverick” also provide a vision of the future at odds with earlier predictions. The forecasts following the announcements that six hours and six minutes remain focus on the more immediate effects of a rapidly rising river: the burial of human history and the destruction of innumerable ecosystems. Just before announcing that there are six seconds to go, the narrator again speaks of these consequences, noting that archaeologists working feverishly along the gorge are upset over the imminent loss of so many traces of human history, but that it is just as important to think about the damage being inflicted on living human and nonhuman beings: Yet who will cry for the tree that survived the ice age and is about to go under? And the green sturgeon that has been spawning in the Gold Sand River for millions of years but is blocked forever behind the dam? Who will cry for the one million people displaced from their Page 207 →homes and land? And you, Shan Gui, who will bring you back from the far north?115 The reference in this passage to human-on-human abuse resonates with those earlier in the narrative to the suffering Chinese endured at the hands of their government and its minions, particularly the Red Guards. Elsewhere in the story, the narrator reinforces such sentiments, quoting Shan Gui's mother as urging her to sacrifice herself for the sake of all other sturgeon: [Mama said:] You’ll hurl yourself against the dam over and over, your flesh splashing over the concrete. You’ll be shredded by the turbines, your blood dyeing the reservoir scarlet red. Your violent death may or may not be enough to shock them into finding a new home, but it's the only chance for those stubborn prehistoric creatures. They have seen the rise and fall of dinosaurs, the coming and going of the big ice and floods, the birth of mammals and humans. Will they survive this? We can

only hope, before they disappear, before we all disappear…We want to help them. Those ancient noble souls deserve to have a place on the planet.116

Mama reveals the likely fate of a species that has endured for millions of years, that has witnessed the rise and fall of countless other species, surviving violent nonhuman phenomena including massive floods and ice ages. This species now has seemingly met its match and is threatened with extinction. The contrast the narrator makes between the sturgeon and most other species is noteworthy in how it highlights not only the unprecedented power of the Three Gorges Dam (i.e., even the sturdiest animals are no match for its turbines) but also the vulnerability of most of the nonhuman, especially to human behaviors. In contrast, the narrator's final prophecy—following his announcement on the last page of “Maverick” that six seconds remain—describes a some-what different future: in time, it is said, the structures that bury will themselves be buried. This prediction is itself prefigured. Several pages earlier, Shan Gui had claimed that, trapped in a tank of blue chemicals, she has “shut down my body to save my heart. I’m saving my heart for the big wave. When it arrives, a path will open through the steel and glass and concrete. It will take me home.”117 The sturgeon at last will be free; animals at last will triumph. Yet matters ultimately are more complicated. A path might open to take the sturgeon home, one that can penetrate steel, glass, and concrete; Page 208 →the sturgeon might at last recover its “original form,” but with just one lone animal remaining it is unlikely that this species has a future. More important, if the seas actually do “rise like mountains” they will shatter “every chain on the river's throat and limbs,” or at least make these dams irrelevant. The terrestrial species that can survive such upheaval are few, and the fate of most aquatic species is likely not so different. What makes the scenario outlined in the final lines of “Maverick” so frightening is that it is not entirely hypothetical. The narrator asserts that what will trigger rising sea levels is “hot wind [blowing] in from the North Pole”—in other words, global warming. Earlier in the story, describing the floods, droughts, and famines that plagued Wushan in the 1960s and killed more than a million people, the narrator claimed that his father “[in those days] couldn't look further into the future, because it was just one dark wave after another until the whole place went under.”118 The futures the narrator and Shan Gui predict—both immediate and more distant—are analogous. Entire landscapes will be submerged, and soon. Yet it is unclear just what will be flooded, and when, and with what effects on survivors, both people and the natural world, particularly over time. The narrator does not address these ambiguities explicitly. But the contrast between the story's anticipatory structure and its largely retrospective content (reversing to some extent the dynamic of Ishimure's Lake of Heaven), together with the contrast between its precision about the timing of the cofferdam's demolition and its relative silence on the effects of this implosion, not to mention its silence on the timing and effects of the massive flood that is predicted, show how much is unknown and unknowable about the future conditions of ecosystems. The background information on Wushan makes clear how much already has been lost, as well as how much there is to lose, but beyond the guaranteed flooding of particular spaces, confusion surrounds the prospects for human and nonhuman survivors. Sakaki's “Someday” exhibits even more anxiety and uncertainty about the future.119 This poem features an individual whose visit to nuclear power plants in and around Tsuruga (Fukui Prefecture, on Japan's western coast) on January 12, 1995 so frightens him that the following day he mistakes a thunderclap and lightning flash for the explosion of a nuclear power plant. He does so even though he likely has experienced countless thunderstorms, so should be able to identify the storm for what it is, and even though the sky itself suggests an impending storm, with turbulent clouds, occasional snow, gusting wind, and confused birds. On the other hand, in midwinter it is understandable that the speaker might not immediately attribute a clap and flash to a thunderstorm. In any case, relieved that the boom and flare were Page 209 →false alarms, the speaker nevertheless asserts that it is only a matter of time before an atomic energy facility actually does explode. He then wraps up the poem by noting that these false yet prophetic alarms occurred four days before the Great Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake of January 17, 1995, which killed well over 6,000 people: Sun in the dead of winter sinking

following the shore along the Sea of Japan I visited Fukui Prefecture's Mihama nuclear power plant then the fast-breeder reactor Monju The next day storm-threatened sky dawning January 13, noon nuclear power plant Ginza120 On the platform of Tsuruga Station waiting for a train Clouds turbulent snow off and on the wind gusting birds confused…Suddenly gwoonbari bari bari Flash dazzling the eyes Deafening roar piercing the ears Ooh God! Buddha! sudden shock sudden cold sweat I'm so thankful that God God thunder rumbling I'm so thankful that the nuclear power plant did not explode But someday…[…] Four days later [] Kobe's large earthquake [] 6,300 dead [6,300] 1995.1121 “Someday” depicts environmental trauma as inevitable. Although understandable considering the troubled histories of the Mihama and Monju Page 210 →nuclear facilities, both of which have suffered serious accidents and been plagued by scandals, the speaker's exaggerated reaction to a mere thunder-storm so soon after visiting these sites reinforces the terror nuclear power plants can instill in people.122 Yet the reference to the Kobe earthquake does not shift the source of the traumas the speaker envisions from human behaviors to “natural” phenomena—as is true of the poem's brief move from nuclear power plants to thunderstorms—so much as it underscores the involvement of both people and the nonhuman in environmental upset. The human death toll of the Kobe earthquake was so high not simply because of the tremendous tectonic energy released but also because the lowlying areas of the city had not been built to withstand extreme shaking.123 Following the warning, “But someday · · ·” (da ga itsuka · · ·) immediately with “Four days later / Kobe's

massive earthquake / 6,300 dead” reinforces both that disasters are imminent and that nuclear power plant accidents are not the only tragedies awaiting human and nonhuman communities. The poem is visually striking, the warning a single line written in kana, while information on the earthquake is mostly in characters, three lines compressed tightly together; “someday” is no longer simply a matter of speculation. “Someday” remains notably silent on when the next disaster will occur and what form it will take. The poem concludes with an ambiguous mix of finality and anticipation: finality in that a “someday” has arrived, sooner than expected; anticipation in that there are many more “somedays” to come—including those where nuclear power plants melt down, triggered by earthquakes, as happened in the July 2007 Niigata–Chetsu Oki Earthquake and even more dramatically in the March 2011 Thoku earthquake catastrophe—and that these likely will be more devastating to the planet.124 Taking on not the global but the galactic, Sakaki's “In the 21st Century” is place-stamped “Korea Pusan / United Nations Army Cemetery” and time-stamped October 1996, the forty-fifth anniversary of this thirty-five-acre site commemorating Allied servicemen who died in Korea.125 But as in so many of Sakaki's poems this grounding is overwhelmed by the text itself. Unlike Kim Kwanggyu's poem “Relationship of Thoughts,” which lists what will happen under certain conditions (i.e., people thinking only of their own specialties), Sakaki's poem lists seemingly assured attributes of the twenty-first century. “In the 21st Century” is a visually striking two-page text that consists of eleven numbered sections, six on the first page, divided into two columns (1–3/4–6), and five on the second page, also divided into two columns (7–9/10–11). This relative crowding of information—as though the speaker had lifted material from an official pamphlet, perhaps one obtained Page 211 →at the cemetery—gives the text an aura of authority. The first ten sections begin with the refrain, “In the 21st century” (21 seiki ni wa). This refrain is followed by a catalog of ten items, followed first by the subject marker ga (), several spaces, and then the word nai (; is/are no/will be no). For instance, the first stanza begins: (I) In the twenty-first century 21 There will be no true intentions There will be no pretenses There will be no string pulling There will be no faking There will be no bullying 126 Appearing to have none of the ambiguity of hanging chads, the hanging nai's here reinforce that there will be no real intentions, no pretenses, no string pulling, no fakes, no bullying. Cataloged in the following sections as not existing in the twenty-first century are everything from political shenanigans, social problems, and sales taxes to diseases, weapons, environmental pollution, and sites of nuclear disaster such as Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The first nine sections also list more desirable phenomena including everything from health drinks and the Internet to Valentine's Day, Nobel Prizes, and peacekeeping organizations, but these are the exceptions. In contrast, the tenth section both lists more positive phenomena, and specifies that these things will be absent only in specific places. The ten lines following the opening refrain “In the 21st century” begin with a type of person /animal or place (e.g., children, birds, fields), followed by the preposition ni (in, at, on), several spaces, characteristics of these places (e.g., smiles, songs, earthworms), the subject marker ga, and then the hanging negative nai. This section declares that that there will be no smiles, songs, earthworms, dragonfly nymphs, mushrooms, fish, sun, cloud shadows, color, or stars in places one would expect them—children's faces, birds, fields, rivers, forests, coral reefs, deserts, the ground, rainbows, and the Milky Way, respectively. So the future of smiles, stars, and so on is uncertain. Perhaps smiles still will exist, just not on children's faces, and stars will have vanished, but only from the Milky Way. Dashing these hopes, the eleventh and final section gives two different predictions:

(II) In the 21st century there will be absolutely nothing nothing will be absolutely nothing Page 212 → yet somewhere —tidings of wind— Somewhere in the 21st century Urashima Tar and Otohimeare likely to exist Urashima Tar and Otohimeare likely to exist.127 The section first asserts that in the twenty-first century there will be absolutely nothing (nai nai zukushi naizukushi). But then it unexpectedly changes course, indicating that the legendary figures Urashima Tar and Otohime are likely to exist (iru s na) somewhere (doko ka ni).128 Certainty becomes ambiguity. Sakaki's poem does not state how or when in the next century these various disappearances will occur, far from idle concerns for a text published in the mid-1990s. More explicitly ambiguous are the longer-term consequences of these disappearances for both people and the nonhuman realm. “In the 21st Century” makes the intratextually contradictory claims that “somewhere” in this postapocalyptic world there are “tidings of wind,” that “somewhere” on the globe Urashima Tar and Otohime are to be found. If taken literally, the evocation of Urashima and Otohime implies that the bottom of the sea might be spared, remarkable considering the damage done even to the Milky Way. But mention of the two legendary characters also suggests that stories themselves have a chance of surviving. It is unclear whether the stories might exist as tangible or intangible objects (books or oral tales), but their continued presence means not only that people have survived but also that creative production remains part of their lives. After all, “In the 21st Century” repeats the verb nai (is/are no, will be no), a word used for the nonexistence of everything but people, leaving the human condition uncertain. The poem appears unwilling to declare its own demise a certainty, much less the demise of the species on which it depends for creation and circulation. Like Wang Ping's “Maverick” and Sakaki's “Someday,” “In the 21st Century” asserts that broad environmental destruction is inevitable, but at times the poem is subtly, at times notably, ambiguous as to conditions in a postapocalyptic world. Many futures considered to be known are in fact anything but. Discourse on ecodegradation is nothing if not abundant, and most literature that engages with environmental problems draws directly from personal observations and local predecessors, even as it frequently strives to Page 213 →become more ecologically cosmopolitan and address concerns with global resonances. But much of this creative writing, even texts that exude self-confidence (e.g., those that assert the future will be one of extremes), interweaves undeniable ambiguities. Creative works that address damage to ecosystems just as often confuse environmental conditions as they depict conditions that are confusing. That is, they feature nonhuman bodies and landscapes whose actualities are difficult to assess, often because of their conflicting attributes (e.g., bodies that appear healthy but display symptoms that suggest they are not; landscapes where some species are obviously thriving and others clearly struggling). They also can confuse the reader by providing fragmented or contradictory information on the conditions of individual bodies and environments about which much more is clearly known (e.g., nonhuman bodies of which only a single facet is described). Such discourse points to the inevitability of uncertainty in both literary and physical environments. Yet only rarely does it suggest that in such a milieu human behaviors ultimately do not matter. On the contrary, even creative works that feature the actual or anticipated demise of large ecosystems generally depict missed opportunities for people both to exacerbate and to forestall if not prevent environmental trauma. Behaviors do matter, but their own discrepancies can be even more ambiguous than those of the discourse that describes them. It is to literary negotiations of these behavioral contradictions and their evaluations that I now turn.

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FOUR / Capitalizing on Contradiction Although increasingly conscious of environmental degradation, we remain remarkably unaware of how our behaviors affect ecosystems near and far. We know surprisingly little about the effect of human actions on the etiologies, the patterns of progression and regression, and the consequences of damaged environments. Felling trees clearly kills them, but to what extent does felling trees injure the flora and fauna that live in them or rely on them for sustenance? How much do these injuries matter? How many dead trees does it take to matter? If trees are left where they fall, their bodies can provide homes for other species; if they are removed, space is made for other plants to grow. It is uncertain whether this regeneration can compensate for taking down trees, regardless of why they were felled. Even more complex is determining the ecological cost of possessing an object constructed of trees logged elsewhere. Daniel Goleman points out concerning the “objects” with which we surround ourselves: We go through our daily life awash in a sea of things we buy, use, and throw away, waste, or save. Each of those things has its own history and its own future, backstories and endings largely hidden from our eyes, a web of impacts left along the way from the initial extraction or concoction of its ingredients, during its manufacture and transport, through the subtle consequences of its use in our homes and work-places, to the day we dispose of it. And yet these unseen impacts of all that stuff may be their most important aspect.1 Goleman suggests that the effects of our acquisitions terminate the day “we dispose of [them].” Yet some cultural products languish for millennia. Human behaviors are nothing if not ambiguous: the acts themselves, as well as their causes and motives; their relationships with other actions, whether human or nonhuman, whether performed by a single individual or a group of people; their effects on human and nonhuman bodies; and the reactions they provoke. Behaviors tend to be some combination of unpredictable, Page 215 →inconsistent, contradictory, and unclear. General patterns exist, but ambiguities are often a basic component of even the most expected, repeated actions. This is part of what makes human damage of environments so difficult to prevent or remediate. As the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's “Saeu i nun” (Shrimp Eyes, 1993) suggests, even something so seemingly innocuous as writing a poem can have ambiguous consequences. This prose poem—which like so many of Ch’oe Sngho's texts is situated in an indeterminate location and whose only specifically “Korean” feature is the language of its composition—depicts an individual anxious that his efforts to celebrate a crustacean in verse might backfire and ultimately harm the very creature that has so mesmerized him. Admitting that he is still captivated by the two protruding, gleaming golden eyes of a shrimp he spotted one night swimming toward him while he was standing “on a lakeshore” (hosukka e s), the narrator claims that these eyes are more beautiful than any he has ever seen. He wonders what to do with this vision: he questions whether it might be better to have it remain in memory, since translating it into written language could, he believes, “ruin the shrimp's eyes” (saeu i nun l mangch’ida).2 The narrator does not elaborate on how writing about eyes might “ruin” them, but there are several possibilities. Perhaps his literary skills are not up to the task of describing something so magnificent, so any attempt to do so would be doomed and figuratively destroy the shrimp's eyes. A greater concern from an ecological perspective is that alerting people to the splendor of this animal paradoxically might hasten its downfall. To be sure, if this individual has spotted an endangered species of shrimp, then publicizing its distinctiveness could result in increased protection of the animal. But how many times have people who have stumbled on spectacular plants, animals, and geological features regretted sharing their findings; word of magnificent landscapes spreads quickly and awakens desires to see them at first hand, which in turn can increase the possibility of devastating the very parts of the nonhuman that are being celebrated.3 In contrast with the Korean poet Chng Hynjong's “Kge mwni” (What's That?, 1995) on the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India (1984), where writing about ruined eyes promises to save other, healthy eyes, writing about glorious eyes in “Shrimp Eyes” is not without danger.4 So Ch’oe Sngho's narrator strikes a compromise: he writes that he has seen eyes of great beauty but neither elaborates

nor gives his location. Creative works highlighting ambiguities in human behaviors and their effects on environments are an important part of literature that addresses ecodegradation. This chapter analyzes some principal ways in which behavioral Page 216 →ambiguities are textually negotiated: in discourse on the uncertainties of human responsibility (causality and accountability), on the contradictions that characterize many human interactions with environments, and on the difficulties of assessing human behaviors.

Determining Cause, Assessing Accountability Some of the greatest behavioral ambiguities surrounding ecodegradation involve responsibility—both physical cause and moral accountability. Even the most basic questions often are difficult to answer. It can be challenging to determine whether human behaviors, nonhuman actions/phenomena, or a combination of the two brought about the adverse transformation of a particular landscape. If both people's behaviors and nonhuman processes are involved, it can be difficult to ascertain the precise ratio, or even the principal cause. If nonhuman factors are the chief culprits, it is often unclear whether people could have done something to thwart destruction. In any situation where people could have tried to prevent environmental damage, to what extent should they be accountable for the resulting harm? Certain groups are most obviously at fault—government units that permit and even encourage exploitation of ecosystems, corporate bodies that fund this abuse, and individuals who directly harm the nonhuman. But other bodies, including financial and religious groups, also play fundamental if more obscure roles in degradation. The role of necessity also must be examined. If need is presumed but not actual—if an individual or group deems a particular behavior essential to survival when in fact it is not—accountability can be even more difficult to establish. These questions, frequently addressed by creative texts that depict damaged landscapes, are important for both alleviating current environmental debilitation and preventing it in the future. Among People Much creative writing spotlights human behaviors that facilitate environmental degradation. But while they are unambiguous about human as opposed to nonhuman responsibility, these texts also frequently are vague about exactly which people and behaviors are to blame. Even those writings that condemn particular groups and practices for harming environments often show that cause and accountability are multifaceted. A corporate board might plan, finance, and oversee a factory that disgorges poisonous chemicals and damages surrounding ecosystems. But the board members rely on the conscious Page 217 →and unconscious cooperation of many other individuals and groups, including people who are adversely affected by the factory's chemical effusions (e.g., factory workers and residents living in the vicinity of the plant). Determining which individuals and groups are involved, not to mention the extent of their involvement, is often virtually impossible. Many creative texts underline this conundrum not by intricately subdividing responsibility but instead by implicating people and behaviors tout court. By holding everyone accountable for ecodegradation, these texts raise an important question about collective culpability—if all are responsible, to what extent is any single person or behavior responsible? It is one thing to maintain that environments are damaged by far more human groups and behaviors than generally are acknowledged; it is another to blame everyone for everything. The Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian's hefty novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain, 1989) provides valuable perspectives on this phenomenon. A novelist, dramatist, director, and painter, Gao Xingjian was born and raised in China and graduated from the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute in 1962 with a degree in French language and literature; he first traveled to France in 1979 as interpreter for a delegation of Chinese writers. In the 1980s he pursued theory and experimental drama in China despite constant battles with the authorities, but in 1987 he relocated to Paris and in 1997 became a French citizen, three years before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Un-like other prominent émigré writers of Chinese heritage in France—including the best-selling author Dai Sijie and Académie française member François Cheng—Gao Xingjian has continued to write most of his work in Chinese and publishes largely in Taiwan.5 His work is banned in China but is widely available there; it also has

been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese and Korean. Although Gao Xingjian is not known primarily as an environmental writer, many of his texts at least touch on ecodegradation. His most overtly ecological work is the drama Wild Man (1985), which addresses many of the environmental problems facing China and the world. Its characters condemn habitat loss and species eradication; they speak as well of the paradoxes of nature conservation. The play's lead figure—referred to simply as The Ecologist (Shengtaixuejia)—denounces conventional human interactions with landscapes, particularly deforestation, and attempts to convince loggers that transforming woodlands into nature reserves is in their best interest.6 More ecologically ambiguous is Soul Mountain, which in many ways is “typical roots literature [xungen wenxue] in that it explores or imagines a Chinese tradition counter to the orthodoxy and based on the heritage of the ancient state of Chu, Daoism, and the cultures of minority groups.”7 This somewhat Page 218 →convoluted but engrossing novel is narrated by a young urban Chinese man who, not unlike Gao Xingjian, after a misdiagnosis of cancer travels to the lands of the Qiang (northwestern Sichuan Province, southwest China), Miao (southern China), and Yi peoples (southwest China), three of China's officially recognized ethnic minority groups.8 On his journey he meets fascinating individuals from diverse backgrounds who deepen his understanding of himself, his nation, humanity, and the natural world. The principal concerns of the protagonist—who refers to himself alternately as “I,” “you,” “he,” and “she”—are self-reflection, discovery, and analysis. His often profound insights into his own life are augmented by shrewd discussions of China and the Chinese, past and present. He also incorporates a thorough ornithological and botanical taxonomy of China's natural realm and comments throughout the novel on the ecological problems that plague his country and the planet more generally. Critical studies of Soul Mountain seldom refer to the novel's passages on environmental abuse, which to be sure often are overshadowed by discourse on interactions among people or between people and environments that are not obviously damaged. But the ways Gao Xingjian's text addresses ecodegradation, including the novel's entangling of environmental and social problems, offer important insights into human relationships with the natural world. Not only does this work, unlike A Cheng's King of Trees, discursively reorder nature “through the use of a degree of taxonomic detail beyond that in most contemporary Chinese literature,” ultimately suggesting that “no register of language can bring nature fully into human comprehension.”9 It also raises questions of culpability and accountability concerning environmental degradation. Soul Mountain attacks both Chinese people's treatment of one another, including during the Cultural Revolution (1966– 76), and their exploitation of their natural environments. Yet by speaking generally of people (ren) as responsible, by implicating everyone, including in some cases humanity in general, this novel spreads culpability so broadly that it at times paralyzes judgment and at others threatens to become nearly meaningless. Soul Mountain opens with the narrator arriving on a rickety bus in an unnamed “small southern mountain town.”10 He was enticed to this region by a chance conversation on a train with a man who claimed to be headed to Lingshan (Soul Mountain), a place he described as replete with wondrous phenomena including ancient, seemingly untouched forests. Confused as to how to reach Lingshan from the town and finding the bus station shuttered with no one available to assist him, the narrator contemplates both the ironies of visiting a place that has yet to become a tourist destination and his disdain for tourist sites and the hordes of people who flock to them: Page 219 → There were no tourists like you among those who got off the bus. Of course, you're not that type of tourist. It's just your attire…there's no one else dressed like you coming and going on the streets…You haven't come to have fun at one of those places on the sunny side of a mountain where people watch people, people are next to people, people jostle people, and where people leave behind the skins of melons and fruits, soft drink bottles, cans and boxes, sandwich wrappings, and cigarette butts. Sooner or later this place too presumably will be unable to escape such spectacle. You're here before they build brightly colored, eye-dazzling pavilions and terraces, before reporters come with their cameras, before celebrities leave their inscriptions. You can't help secretly rejoicing good fortune. At the same time, you're also a bit anxious. There's no indication here of anything for tourists.11

The narrator is quick to distinguish himself from the ordinary tourist, and this small town from more established tourist sites, where the center of attention is people (ren; ), a focus he highlights with a sentence whose first half repeats the character ren six times— and concludes with a list of six things that people discard. But before long the narrator discovers that the small town where he has disembarked is not as untouched by visitors as he originally imagined. On a nearby bridge he finds a plaque, affixed in 1983, marking repair work done in 1962. He comments that this sign “surely is a signal of the beginning of the tourist industry here,” emphasizing that it is only a matter of time before the hordes descend.12 The narrator also reveals that the tourist industry is not the only source of pollution. Walking along a road in town, he is passed by trucks whose drivers mercilessly honk their horns and hang outside their windows, yelling at pedestrians to clear the track. This village might be remote, but it is hardly an ecological paradise. Indeed, from the very beginning of Soul Mountain the reader is cautioned that primeval (old-growth) forests, spaces virtually untouched by human hands, exist mostly in the imagination. This becomes more apparent as the novel progresses. The narrator celebrates the beauty of China's landscape while also showing how many of the nation's ecosystems have been devastated. A botanist (zhiwuxuejia) he befriends early in the novel regales him with the Daoist Dao de jing, proclaiming loudly, “People [ren] follow [fa] earth [di], earth follows sky [tian], sky follows the Way [dao], and the Way follows nature [ziran]. Don't do things that go against nature's character [ziran benxing].”13 But this is only after telling him that in the maple and Page 220 →linden forest he is visiting: “They've [already] chopped down every tree that can be sold as timber…Strictly speaking, there are no longer any primeval forests here [yuanshi senlin]. At best these are secondary forests [yuanshi ci senlin].”14 Daoist sayings, however forcefully asserted, are no match for loggers. The botanist then tells the narrator what he thinks of efforts to save the giant panda, the deforesting of surrounding landscapes, the effects of the impending construction of the Three Gorges Dam on both people and the natural world, and human interactions with environments more generally. Expressing his frustration at ambiguous, contradictory, and self-defeating human behaviors, the botanist declares: It's just symbolic [saving the giant panda], a kind of consolation. People [ren] need to deceive themselves. On the one hand, we rush to rescue a species that already has lost its ability to survive, but on the other hand we're intensifying our destruction of the very environment of human survival. Look at the banks of the Min River where you entered. The forests all have been logged bare. Even the Min has become black, but the Yangzi is much worse—and yet they're going to build a dam in the Three Gorges. Of course it's romantic to let one's imagination run wild. But there are many historical records of this ground's geological fault collapsing. It goes without saying that blocking off the river and constructing a dam will destroy the entire ecology of the Yangzi River valley. Once a large earthquake is induced, the hundreds of millions of people living on the middle and lower reaches of the river all will become fish and turtles. Of course no one will listen to an old man like me. But when you plunder nature like this, nature always gets its revenge!…It's not animals that are terrifying [kepa], it's people [ren]…Young man, it's not nature that's terrifying [kepa], it's people [ren]. So long as you become well acquainted with nature [ni zhiyao shuxi ziran], it will be close to you [ta jiu tong ni qinjin]. People [ren] of course are intelligent. There's nothing they can't manufacture, from rumors to test tube babies. And yet every day people [ren] destroy two or three species. This is the absurdity of people [ren].15 This sermon on anthropogenic environmental degradation highlights human absurdity (ren de xuwang) and declares people (ren) more frightening than wild animals (yeshou) or nature (ziran); it is delivered by a botanist, whose claims cannot be easily dismissed and which add legitimacy to the novel's subsequent critiques of human behaviors. People might have a tradition of Page 221 →speaking of harmony between themselves and nature, but they thoughtlessly annihilate the nonhuman bodies on which they depend for survival; they possess an unlimited capacity for both creating and destroying themselves and other species. The botanist believes that nature will seek revenge and likely will harm people considerably, but in truth many parts of the natural world appear in jeopardy. He claims that learning about nature will create close bonds between people and the natural world, but he remains silent on whether these ties can forestall ecological degradation.

Similar comments on human greed and environmental damage appear throughout Soul Mountain, voiced by both the narrator and the individuals he encounters. The narrator describes forests that no longer exist, lakes that are a fraction of their former size, fish that are too toxic for consumption, and putrid rivers that have wiped out dozens of species.16 He also cites a recent prediction that because of ever-increasing silt accumulation brought about by land reclamation, in a few decades Dongting Lake, one of China's largest, will exist only in map and memory. At one point in the second half of the novel, having traveled to a site that was logged for two years (1971–73) during the Cultural Revolution and remains denuded more than a decade later despite the fact that it is in the middle of a nature reserve, the narrator comes upon an expanse of “beautiful alpine marshland.” Moved by this sight, he stands for a long time in the cold wind, “thinking about the bit of primitive ecology that's perhaps remaining in this piece of nature.”17 He then comments: “[The classical philosopher] Zhuangzi, who lived more than two thousand years ago, has already said that useful timber [youyong zhi cai] dies young by the ax [yao yu fujin], and useless timber [wuyong zhi cai] enjoys good fortune [fangwei daxiang]. People today are even greedier than those of old, calling into question Huxley's theory of evolution.”18 This episode is revealing in several respects. As dramatized in Ah Cheng's King of Trees (examined in Chapter 2), during the Cultural Revolution “useless” trees were felled, at times to make room for more “useful” counter-parts, thereby reversing Zhuangzi's parable of the tree (cited in Chapter 1), where “useless” trees are spared precisely because of their uselessness. Gao Xingjian's narrator contrasts ancient peoples, who showed mercy on at least a small fraction of the nonhuman, albeit for utilitarian reasons, with their modern counterparts, who profit from ruthlessly felling entire landscapes.19 That a space within a nature reserve remains bare long after the Cultural Revolution highlights just how little attention has been paid to restoring landscapes. For its part, the reference to Thomas Huxley takes the reader back to the Chinese scholar Yan Fu's Chinese-language translation of the English biologist's Evolution and Ethics (1893; Chn. trans. 1896). This text Page 222 →and others on Social Darwinism had a tremendous effect on late-Qing and early-Republican intellectuals, including the famed reformer Liang Qichao, who was optimistic that with the proper changes to their societies people could “steadily improve.” Gao Xingjian's narrator is not the first to question the accuracy of Huxley's theories; after witnessing the bloodshed of World War One and the failures of the Chinese republic, Yan Fu himself declared that “three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to nothing but four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness, and sleaze.”20 Soul Mountain draws attention to the effects of human avarice and selfishness on people and the nonhuman alike.21 Addressing the many ways China's ecosystems have been and will continue to be compromised, Gao Xingjian's novel depicts a nation whose people and natural world are both at risk. In some cases the narrator identifies the persons who directly caused environmental degradation, and in many others these agents can be inferred (loggers chop down trees, fishers deplete stocks). But as suggested in the passages cited above, he more often assigns responsibility to people in general; although his travels, at least in this novel, are limited to China and the brutalized ecosystems to which he refers are mainly Chinese, he often blames not the Chinese but instead “people.” To be sure, in some cases by “people” he clearly means Chinese, but often he appears to be implicating all of humankind. In this the narrator resembles many who condemn human transformations of environments; speaking generally of “people” as culprits, numerous creative works label environmental degradation as anthropogenic but fail to identify the particular individuals or behaviors behind it. This environmentally cosmopolitan strategy has important consequences. Most frequently, it can free individuals, groups, and entire nations from culpability. If everyone is to blame, is anyone really to blame? Individual and specific group responsibility rapidly evaporates, and there is little motivation to change behaviors. Even more sobering, if everyone plays a part in degrading ecosystems near and far, a single individual appears unable to do much to ameliorate existing ills and prevent future damage. Although some people he encounters on his journey share his beliefs, Gao Xingjian's narrator sees himself as struggling alone, not against a particular social system but rather against humanity, an even more impossibly large target. This leads not to determined resistance to ecological abuses but instead to further contemplation and then despair that nothing he does will make a difference, a common sentiment among post–Cultural Revolution Chinese intellectuals.

Listening to the Yangzi's waters in the still of night about two-thirds of the way through his trip, the narrator ponders what to do with the rest of his Page 223 →life. He considers collecting the Daqi people's archaeological remains scattered along the riverbed but then abandons the thought, deciding there is no meaning in shards of an ancient civilization because soon the Three Gorges Dam will submerge even walls dating to the Han dynasty.22 After proclaiming that he perpetually searches for meaning, the narrator asks, “What in fact is meaning? Can I block people [ren] from constructing this large dam as an epitaph of their self-extermination? I can only search for my own self, ordinary, paltry grains of sand.”23 Declaring his “own self” (wo de ziwo) tiny grains of sand, the narrator highlights his ambiguous position. Far from verging on becoming half a world through his protests, per the Asian American folk music trio A Grain of Sand's famed “Yellow Pearl” (1973),24 much less as an entire world or collection of worlds, per the opening line of the English poet William Blake's environmentally conscious “Auguries of Innocence” (1803)—“To see a world in a grain of sand”—the narrator of Soul Mountain emphasizes his insignificance and unwitting complicity.25 He is at once small and vulnerable, like the grains of sand that line the river soon slated for damming, and implicated in the dam's construction, sand being an essential component of the concrete that forms the dam. Questions about the possibility of thwarting ecological devastation are replaced by resignation. The narrator wonders how much sense it makes to create more cultural products, including books, when they are likely to be destroyed: “I might as well write a book on the human self [ren de ziwo] regardless of whether it will be published. What's the significance of one more or one less book being written? Is it possible that still too little culture has been annihilated? Do people [ren] need so much culture? And what is culture?”26 He complicates what could have been a simple critique of the Cultural Revolution (and its destruction of culture) by indicating that the revival of “culture” is no panacea and that certain cultural constructions, including dams, might still need to be destroyed. Several chapters later, conversing with leaders and cadres at a forest reserve, the narrator reminds himself that he is not someone who can mobilize people to protect ecosystems. Feeling helpless, he confesses in his narrative what he cannot tell officials directly: I’m neither a leader of writers nor a writer who leads other writers…I can't even protect myself, so what can I say? I can say only that protecting the natural environment is an important undertaking and has important implications for future generations. The Yangzi has already become a yellow river, bringing down silt and sediment. And still they're going to build a dam on the Three Gorges! I of course Page 224 →can't say this. I can only switch the topic to the Wild Man [yeren, a semihuman creature and obsession of the forest employees].27 Of course by writing Soul Mountain the narrator does say much of what needs to be said. But he can only write about the importance of changing behaviors and has little hope that his words will reach others, much less motivate them. Gao Xingjian's narrator makes no secret of his frustration with what people have done to themselves and to the nonhuman. He goes so far as to follow a description of a torture technique used during the Cultural Revolution (people tied together with wires like fish on hooks and then executed) with the remark, “Strangely, the more people are killed the more people there are, but the more fish that are caught the fewer fish there are. What if things were reversed? This would be much better.”28 Reminiscent of Han Yu's espousing depopulation during the Tang dynasty, cited at the beginning of Chapter 1, this is a powerful statement regardless of provenance. But it is particularly noteworthy coming from a man who has shown such empathy toward both people and the nonhuman. In fact, after this assertion the narrator comments that “People and fish actually have something in common. Big fish [dayu, ] and big people [daren, ; people of great virtue] are all gone, showing that this world isn't meant for them.”29 He suggests that the “teeming masses” thrive at the expense of people of great virtue. Here and elsewhere in Soul Mountain the narrator speaks of atrocities committed during the Cultural Revolution, but he makes it clear that abuses have not been confined to that era. Soul Mountain unearths many ambiguities of human behaviors vis-à-vis environments. The narrator roundly condemns people for destroying the nonhuman bodies on which they depend for their increasingly comfortable

lives and issues warnings that even the most stalwart ecophobe would find difficult to ignore.30 Yet in blaming everyone he leaves unclear just who and what are responsible for the environmental degradation he describes, and he also reveals the ambiguous role of the individual, like himself, who is deeply disturbed by what has been done to ecosystems everywhere. By positing him-self alone, pitted against humanity, without plans to change his own behaviors vis-à-vis environments in any significant way, the narrator in some ways condemns himself to failure. But in writing about his inner struggles despite knowing that his book, like so many cultural products, might be discarded before it is read by anyone who can learn from his experiences, he suggests possibilities and exhibits confidence: possibilities that he might one day be capable of altering his own behaviors, if not voice his concerns openly, and Page 225 →confidence that articulating his sentiments might allow others to express their own, at first in writing and then ultimately in speech and in other (changed) behaviors. Necessity and Accountability Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain nearly negates the concept of personal accountability for harming ecosystems, at the same time that it questions individual responsibility for condemning ecodegradation. The novel points to the ambiguities inherent in identifying precise agents of damage (beyond the human/nonhuman dichotomy) and assigning the duties of prevention and remediation. In contrast, the Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji's “Nametoko yama no kuma” (Bears of Mount Nametoko, 1934) makes clear the individual's role in harming animals (in this case anthropomorphized bears) but implicitly questions accountability for this damage in light of both actual and perceived (human) necessity. This short story by early twentieth-century Japan's most prominent ecologically conscious writer, and one of modern Japan's first literary figures to regularly chastise the nation's industrialization, queries the degree to which human need mitigates accountability.31 If necessity is presumed but not actual, if an individual or group genuinely believes a particular behavior is required for survival when it in fact is not—either because there is no chance of survival or because there are unrecognized alternatives—the story asks how accountable people are for their behaviors, what difference access to alternatives makes, and whether tenacity in pursuing alternatives matters. “Bears of Mount Nametoko” features Kojr, an impoverished and reluctant hunter convinced that killing bears is the only way he can make a living. He spares some bears he encounters and apologizes to those he kills, but in the end he is slaughtered by a bear that seems to be disturbed by his hypocrisy.32 Miyazawa's short story most obviously highlights contradictions both between attitudes and behaviors and between empirical conditions and behaviors (how people interact with animals). On the one hand, like many boreal peoples who revered the bear as Lord of the Animals yet hunted it because of its mythological dimensions—such as the Ainu, who until the early twentieth century practiced a bear ritual that involved raising and then killing and eating a bear cub to celebrate the benevolence this species demonstrated toward people—Kojr hunts bears despite his deep respect for them.33 Accentuating this disjuncture between attitudes and behaviors is the gap between Kojr's feelings toward his hunting dog and toward bears: unlike Biyari in the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima's “The Last Page 226 →Hunter” (1987) who shares a special bond with his dog Yifan (discussed in Chapter 2), Kojr's connection with his companion dog is less profound than his ties with the bears, his prey; the dog is loyal to Kojr and the two make an effective hunting team, but Kojr's feelings for the bears are depicted as much more intense than those toward his dog. On the other hand, Kojr kills bears even though he knows that his buyer already has a surplus of bearskins, so he will receive a much lower price than he deserves for his take. But even more intriguing are the conflicts in behaviors, most notably between Kojr's interactions with bears and with people, and secondarily in Kojr's treatment of the various bears he encounters. These contradictions accentuate deeper ambiguities threading through the story about relationships among people and environments, especially human responsibility for their destruction. The narrator of “Bears of Mount Nametoko” claims that Kojr feels great sympathy for bears yet believes that he has no choice but to hunt them; Kojr says that were he not to hunt bears he would have to resort to foraging, a lifestyle for which he almost certainly would pay with his life. So it is with a heavy heart that he skins bears and extracts their livers. He apologizes to the animals he kills: Bear, I didn't kill you because I hate you. I have to make a living, just as you have to be shot. I’d like

to have a different job, work with no sin attached, but I don't have land, and they claim the trees belong to the authorities, and when I go into town nobody wants anything to do with me. I’m a hunter because I don't have a choice. It's your fate that you were born a bear and my fate that I have this job.34

Kojr feels guilty for killing bears until his last breath; the narrator claims Kojr's final conscious thought is “Bears, forgive me” (kumadomo, yuruseyo).35 Kojr even thinks that he can understand what the bears are saying to one another. Watching a mother bear staring at a distant valley with her two cubs, he imagines that the animals are discussing various features of the landscape. The sight moves him, and he slinks away stealthily, hoping that the bears remain unaware of his presence. As this scene suggests, Kojr's treatment of bears varies depending on how he relates with these animals.36 Following standard hunting practice, he does not kill the mother or her cubs.37 But Kojr also spares a cornered bear that shouts at him: “What do you want? Why do you have to kill me?”38 When Kojr responds that he hunts only with great reluctance, the bear asks him to wait, claiming there are things it still needs to do; the bear promises Page 227 →that if Kojr frees him now, in two years it will deposit its dead body on Kojr's doorstep. The animal honors its commitment; two years later Kojr notices a familiar brownish-black shape by a hedge and quickly realizes this is the same bear whose life he had spared. Here the narrative forces the reader to suspend disbelief; it is simpler to imagine Kojr believing he converses with animals than to imagine him thinking he finds a dead bear outside his door that has deliberately sacrificed itself for him. How the bear landed there so punctually remains uncertain. More important is the disjuncture between how Kojr treats this bear and the way he deals with the many bears whose voices are not audible to him. The narrator suggests that it is a bear's behavior that determines the hunter's reaction: bears doting on their cubs and those exhibiting unusual behavior are heard and spared.39 In other words, how Kojr handles a bear is directly related to how the bear conducts itself. The narrator of “Bears of Mount Nametoko” does not depict bears as endangered; Kojr travels far to find the animals, but only because their habitats are distant from his home. Yet this short story brings to light how differently a single individual can treat members of the same nonhuman species, not to mention members of different species. Also significant is the gulf between Kojr's interactions with bears and his dealings with people: he cuts a strong, adaptable, and compassionate figure while in the mountains, particularly face to face with bears, but he cowers when before other people and shows no flexibility in his understanding of human bonds. His lack of confidence in interpersonal relations paradoxically results in a conviction that he has no choice but to kill the animals he so reveres. Kojr's inability to interact productively with people results in unnecessary nonhuman deaths. The narrator describes Kojr as completely at home in the mountains. He is not always the most agile climber, but he does not think twice about roaming far over rough terrain to find his prey. He remains composed even when the fiercest bears rear up at him and begin to charge: “Kojr would stay perfectly calm [under these conditions]. Aiming at the bear's forehead from behind a tree, he would fire his rifle. The forest would roar, the bear would fall to the ground, dark red blood would gush from its mouth, its nose would make a sniffling sound, and it would die.”40 But most of the confidence Kojr displays in the physically demanding mountain ecosystems disappears when he returns to town. The narrator candidly remarks: “When he went to town to sell his bearskins and bear liver, this powerful Kojr was a wretched, pitiful figure.”41 Although in the mountains Kojr acts like a “master,” in town he is reduced to genuflecting before his buyer, who habitually pays him far less than Kojr believes his take is worth. Page 228 → Anticipating the reader's bewilderment about why Kojr does not search for another buyer, the narrator explains: “There are many who would not understand. But in Japan there is an [old] game called kitsuneken [lit. fox fists; a game played with the hands, the positions of which can represent a fox, a man, or a rifle]. Just as the fox is defeated by the hunter and the hunter is defeated by his master, so too the bear was damaged by Kojr [i.e., here Kojr is the rifle] and Kojr was damaged by his [urban] master.”42 All buyers likely would do the same; it is Kojr's fate, as the hunter, to be fleeced. The reader also might wonder why Kojr seems never to challenge his station in

life, why he never moves into the village but instead believes himself fated to live on the margins, where his only choice is to kill bears or starve. The narrator's answer probably would be the same—this is just the way things are. Although readily adapting to the wilderness, when it comes to negotiating the terrain of human society Kojr proves notably rigid. This inflexibility paradoxically leads him to destroy residents of the landscapes where he feels most at home; if Kojr fought or at least in his youth had fought for a better position in society, he might have been able to encounter bears without killing them. The nonhuman loss is compounded by the fact that because Koj r kills bears for their skins and livers, so much of the animal goes to waste. Most of the skins also are unused; Kojr 's buyer claims that he has more than enough and needs no additional stock. Animals are killed so a man can earn income to ward off starvation, but animals themselves are not used for human nourishment. Miyazawa's short story raises essential questions of accountability not limited to prewar Japan. Except for the bear that sacrificed itself for him, Kojr fires the shots that kill the bears he brings back to town. Unlike Soul Mountain, “Bears of Mount Nametoko” does not hesitate to name individual culprits. Yet it remains unclear to what degree Kojr can be held accountable for his behavior. He could be accountable simply because what he believes necessity is in fact likely not so. He could also be culpable because he never attempts, or even investigates, alternative occupations. His talents might have been redirected to a different job, if only he had made an effort. Miyazawa's narrator does not explicitly address these questions. But Kojr's resignation to conditions in town undermines the narrator's otherwise sympathetic portrayal of him. Ultimately, however, the extent to which this makes him accountable for slaying bears, particularly because the bear population does not seem in danger of extinction, remains uncertain. Capitalizing on the confusion surrounding cause and accountability regarding much more severe human abuse of both people and the nonhuman world is the Taiwanese engineer and poet Bai Ling's “Wen weianfu ziyuan Page 229 →shuo” (Hearing the Claim That the Comfort Women Were Volunteers, 2001).43 As its title indicates, what triggers this poem is the claim—made by those attempting to refute charges of sexual abuse by the imperial Japanese army (and generally condemned as apologists for imperial Japanese aggression for so doing)—that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean, and other Asian women volunteered to be comfort women (sex slaves) for the Japanese military during World War Two Former comfort women of all nationalities have vocally denounced wartime Japanese treatment of non-Japanese Asian comfort women and continue to this day to call for reparations and a formal apology. In 2010, on the centenary of Japan's annexation of the Korean peninsula, people from Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and several Western countries signed a petition calling for an official apology and legislated compensation.44 Written a decade ago, at the turn of the twenty-first century, Bai Ling's poem anticipates the continued tenacity both of Japanese politicians and of former comfort women and their governments.45 Echoing late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese rhetoric on comfort women, “Hearing the Claim” declares it absurd to assert that women volunteered (ziyuan) to become sex slaves. But ironically, in the years since the publication of this poem evidence has surfaced that many women were forced into sex slavery not by the Japanese but by local procurers, and, even more significantly, that some women—escaping abuse at home—were in fact volunteers in the strict sense of the word. As C. Sarah Soh has argued, “the abuse and maltreatment of daughters and wives in the [Korean] patriarchal system, with its longstanding masculinist sexual culture, contributed as much as did the colonial political economy to the ready commodification of these women's sexual labor.”46 At the same time, Soh explicitly warns rightists and militant nationalists against taking her book out of context to promote their own “partisan positions” and justify clinging to their distorted partisan versions of “partial truths.”47 Despite the convoluted history to which its title points, the body of “Hearing the Claim” is not bound to a particular time or place. Bai Ling's poem is even less obviously environmentally oriented than the Japanese writer It Hiromi's “Haha ni tsurerarete arechi ni sumitsuku” (Settling on the Waste-land Where Mother Led Us, 2005) discussed below. Yet it draws implicit parallels between misunderstandings of people's abuse of one another and misunderstandings of their abuse of the nonhuman: Forests voluntarily ignite

so lightning can sharpen its whip Page 230 → Buildings tremble of their own accord to make it convenient for the cow-earth to yawn48 Bodies open their own wounds because bullets need to pass through Heads plan to fall down all because of the penetrating benevolence of the samurai's sword All the sweet potatoes peel themselves then lie down across the island and say “Come on, history, trample on me Let me better worship your footprints!”49 The third and fourth stanzas (the middle two stanzas) of “Hearing the Claim” sardonically tweak the preposterousness of asserting that people invite their own suffering; the poem implies that women during wartime no more volunteered to be sex slaves than bodies open their own wounds to help bullets pass through, or heads plan to tumble to the ground because of the compassion of their attackers’ swords. The two preceding stanzas (the first two stanzas of the poem) speak of both the nonhuman realm and human cultural products as inviting destruction by a nonhuman phenomenon: forests set themselves ablaze for the sake of lightning; houses initiate their own trembling to facilitate earthquakes. Repeating zi ( oneself), the third character in each of the first three lines, underlines the intentionality of forests (), buildings (), and bodies (); the verb ziyuan (act voluntarily) used to describe the intentionality of forests in the first line echoes the ziyuan of the title. Like the third stanza, the fourth stanza also speaks of premeditated bodily rupture: heads “plan” (jihua) to tumble. Also noteworthy is why forests, buildings, bodies, and heads act this way: they allegedly are thinking of “enabling” (rang) the “convenience” (fangbian), and the “needs” (yao), or, in the case of heads, the “benevolence” (renci) of their opponents. The sarcasm intensifies. “Hearing the Claim” takes an intriguing twist in the fifth stanza, where attention returns to the nonhuman. This time the subject is cultivated sweet potatoes, which are said to peel themselves (), lie down across the island, and call on history to trample them so that they can worship its foot-prints (rang wo hao hao de ai nimen de jiaoji). These anthropomorphized sweet potatoes are the only part of the nonhuman that invites destruction Page 231 →by people; and unlike the forests, buildings, bodies, and heads of the first four stanzas, they not only peel themselves, but they do so to enable (rang) themselves, as opposed to their attackers, as did the forests of the first stanza. To be sure, the reference to a “history” (lishi) that tramples vegetables need not implicate people; hailstorms can trample sweet potatoes just as easily as shoes or machines. But the mention of peeling indicates human presence: people are depicted as literally and figuratively stomping on one another and on their crops, yet not on a more uncultivated nonhuman, such as the forest of the first stanza. This omission stands out in a poem featuring the other three trajectories of intra- and interspecies violence: human-on-human, non-human-on-human, and nonhuman-on-nonhuman. It suggests that the idea of nonhuman bodies voluntarily harming themselves for the sake of humans is so ludicrous that to include it would divert attention from the poem's principal concern, the falsehood that comfort women invited their own suffering. The text's silence speaks loudly. The deep ironies of Bai Ling's poem, as well as the story of the comfort women more generally, remind us how readily damage to bodies can be dismissed as self-inflicted, and more generally how blithely responsibility can be

assigned and reassigned, often with little regard for empirical circumstances. Similarly, as other creative texts examined in this section indicate, often what makes it so difficult to determine cause and accountability—vital for both preventing and remediating human harm of environments—is the flexibility of the very ideas of cause and accountability themselves. Three points are salient. First, often the greatest challenge is determining whether human or nonhuman behaviors and processes are largely to blame and, if human behaviors are involved, their precise bearing on ecodegradation. Second, in cases where human involvement is readily confirmed, the most troublesome task is to identify the roles of particular individuals or behaviors not only in damaging environments but also in repairing them and preventing further deterioration. And third, when the roles of particular individuals and behaviors are relatively clear, questions of accountability soon arise. Posing these questions is only the beginning of the long pathway toward human and nonhuman recovery from human abuse of ecosystems. Human, Nonhuman, or Both As is true of Soul Mountain, creative works that portray or predict damaged bodies—anything from a planet in ruins to burned farmlands to a single life-less animal—often indicate whether the damage was instigated by people, natural phenomena, or both. And, as with Ishimure Michiko's Sea of Suffering, Page 232 →they also frequently highlight a human penchant to shirk accountability by blaming degraded ecosystems on factors beyond human control. But many literary texts that address ecodegradation are more ambiguous. Some explicitly question whether human (or nonhuman) behaviors are at all responsible, while others depict environments whose injuries just as likely result from human behaviors as from nonhuman factors. This section analyzes three illuminating examples of these contradictions: the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's prose poem “Ch’amsaedl n dis chungnn ga” (Where Do Sparrows Die?, 1993), It Hiromi's prose poem “Settling on the Wasteland,” and the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao's poem “Kdo 10,700m” (Altitude 10,700 Meters, 1992). Ch’oe's prose poem, focusing on sparrows, comments on the impossibility of knowing just who/ what causes their deaths, while It's prose poem, featuring acres of devastated landscape, remains silent about the human role in transforming this space. Sakaki's poem predicts the earth's annihilation but leaves unclear whether responsibility lies with people or the nonhuman. All three texts, portraying environments in obvious distress, reveal the ambiguous role of people in instigating and enabling damage.50 They also describe conditions duplicated in multiple spaces. These works show why it is vital to assess more fully the anthropogenic causes of distressed ecosystems, wherever they might be. The first part of Ch’oe Sngho's brief, straightforward text “Where Do Sparrows Die?” speaks compassionately of the death of a single sparrow (ch’amsae han mari). But halfway through the text one sparrow becomes, as the title anticipates, sparrows in general (ch’amsaedl). In the lines that follow the text talks about where sparrows die and the near impossibility of completely hiding their corpses. The opening and closing lines of this text identify several places these birds take their last breaths: between ceramic pots on terraces, at the bases of cherry trees, at the feet of scarecrows, and elsewhere on the ground since, as the poem notes, “in the sky there is no place to bury even a feather.”51 The narrator here shows how easily the place sparrows died can be identified. Less certain is why sparrows die and what the human role has been in hastening their deaths. The text begins: “Although impossible to know whether it starved to death, froze to death, or was poisoned to death by agricultural chemicals, a single sparrow lies dead on a pile of snow in the gap between jars on the terrace.” Later the narrator suggests the sparrow might simply have succumbed to old age; if this bird was not one of the many that begged for food set out for the family dog, it might be one that simply “grew old and died.” Just as it is impossible to determine how this particular bird died, “Where Do Sparrows Die?” implies that the cause of death for most sparrows is Page 233 →equally unclear. The narrator suggests that this uncertainty stems from many factors. Because the sparrow died in the gap between jars, freezing temperatures might be the cause; the bird might have seen this space as a refuge, however temporary, from the cold. But even if wintry weather was the immediate cause of death, it is possible that the sparrow succumbed because it already was weak from a human-induced food shortage, from having been poisoned, or from some combination of the two. Several lines later the narrator indicates that malnutrition was a real possibility; he asks whether this sparrow was one of those that regularly visited the dog's food bowl, with “begging eyes and bobbing tail to peck at the tips of bean sprouts.”

The appearance of an animal at a feeder does not mean it is in danger of starving to death, but the modifier “begging” (tongnyang) signals that the sparrows vying for dog food might not be particularly well fed. Although human behaviors did not cause the freezing temperatures, and in fact their artifacts likely prolonged the bird's life or at least offered it protection from the cold in its final moments, chances are good that human behaviors decreased this animal's food supply. After all, much of the ground this sparrow traverses probably is suffused with agrochemicals, as is “all the earth” (on ttang) that forms/serves as the grave of these animals (on ttang i kdl i mudm ida).52 Ch’oe Sngho's prose poem suggests that little prevents the earth from being covered with the corpses of poisoned sparrows. Yet because the sparrow on the terrace could simply have died of old age, it is uncertain why these birds die or, even more important, what role people play in their deaths. The narrator speaks of holding the bird, feeling its stiffened body, and thinking, “Being dead means that it no longer is warm. Being dead means that it no longer can fly. Being dead means that it no longer can tweet.”53 Not only does the bird lose its life, but people lose familiar sights and sounds. By including references to agrochemicals and presumably poisoned birds, “Where Do Sparrows Die” amplifies the narrator's concern for the fate of a single sparrow and its broader implications far beyond the sparrow's point of death. The renowned Japanese ecofeminist It Hiromi's prose poem “Settling on the Wasteland Where Mother Led Us”—part of her prizewinning narrative poem Kawara arekusa (Wild Grass on a Riverbank, 2005)—provides an interesting contrast with “Where Do Sparrows Die?”54 Like many of It's works, credited with igniting postwar Japanese women's verse, “Settling on the Wasteland” speaks graphically of female sexuality and bodily functions. Whereas the narrator of Ch’oe Sngho's text immediately notes the ambiguities surrounding the death of a sparrow, then tackles the general fate of the species, the focus of It's prose poem is cultural identities and human Page 234 →relations. But this work raises important questions about how we interpret creative depictions of changed or damaged ecosystems. “Settling on the Wasteland” describes a pair of young Japanese siblings who follow their mother to the American Southwest so she can live with her English-speaking boyfriend. Much of the text's physical and conceptual space is devoted to the struggles of these children with language, especially their resolve to continue speaking Japanese. The narrator's terse description of the desert and surrounding mountains reveals a landscape devastated by unknown forces. This text is more ambiguous concerning damage to ecosystems than much of It's work, but its imprecision makes the story more penetrating. Featuring a burned hillside without assigning cause, this text exemplifies how little the human role in blackening landscapes is pondered and how much the existence of such severe places is taken for granted. It's prose poem begins with a journey to the desert: “We drove for hours; we drove for hours under the blue sky, before arriving at a large home in the wasteland.”55 This landscape is ribbed with sprinklers that green small patches of desert: “In the garden there's a sprinkler that operates in the evening. Oh my, it soaked everything.”56 Depictions of people spurting liquids recur later in the text, the narrator describing her mother nursing their halfsibling and then forcing her adolescent brother to suck her (his mother's) breasts: “The little baby moved its little head and began sucking on one of her breasts…Mother released her other breast…The milk flew out, its shower tracing an arc [nyj ga shuto ko o kaite tobimashita]…My mother seized my little brother and pushed her breast into his mouth…Milk bubbling from [her breast's] smiling, broken, pointed end showered and flooded [emiwareta sentan kara awa no tatsu nyj ga shushushuto afuretekimashita]…[My brother's] mouth dripped [taretenagaremashita] with white milk.”57 Speaking of breast milk as showering (shuto), flying (tobimashita), bubbling (awa no tatsu), showering (shushushuto), flooding (afurete), dripping (tarete), and flowing (nagaremashita), the narrator portrays a woman not only abusing her son but also metaphorically irrigating her surroundings even more thoroughly than do sprinklers. The contrast with landscape that has not been irrigated is stark; immediately after describing the flood emanating from her mother's breasts, and switching from prose to poetry, the narrator speaks of desiccated terrain: The wind changed direction

The wind blew from the desert Parched dry [karakara ni kawaita], In the distance a mountain burned Page 235 → A mountain burned and ashes rained down Ashes covered the sun The sun was visible with the naked eye Parched dry [karakara ni kawaita], Vegetation became corpses Sagebrush emitted strong odors Rabbits and coyotes become corpses and Parched dry [karakara ni kawaita]58 Irrigation soaks through small ecosystems and breast milk soaks through and drips down human bodies, but these minute liquid islands float in an infinitely more vast arid and fiery sea. Subsequent lines further complicate matters. After repeating the refrain “parched dry” (karakara ni kawaita) the narrator comments: “When the winter came with its rains / Soaking, moss grew, shoots came up, and flowers bloomed.”59 Burning mountains thus are sandwiched between dripping human breasts and plants sprouting from rain-drenched as opposed to sprinkler-soaked ground; human acts are bracketed by more “natural” phenomena, although it is possible that human behaviors played a role not only in the desiccation of landscapes but also in their “natural” greening (via rain as opposed to sprinklers). This placement allows for human complicity, but by no means sole responsibility, for the bone-dry, burning landscape; the precise role of human behaviors in altering these ecosystems remains uncertain. This ambiguity points to an even more fundamental dilemma. What if the damaged landscapes or ecological phenomena a text describes resulted at least in part from human behaviors but were not recognized as such in the society where the text was written? What role should authorial knowledge or its lack play in how we discuss the environmental implications of creative works? The same questions should be asked of how we interpret other textual phenomena, but contemplating human responsibility in changing ecosystems seems to be a particularly important endeavor in today's critical environment. A creative work such as “Settling on the Wasteland,” written by an individual with high ecological awareness yet not itself environmentally oriented, thus provides a perfect opportunity for this sort of analysis.60 Also highlighting the ambiguities of responsibility is Sakaki Nanao's “Altitude 10,700 Meters.” Flying high above Japan, pondering the landscape below, the poem's speaker declares: “December 31, 1999 / planet earth will explode / go up in flame and return to nothing.”61 In the concluding lines, he describes the view as his plane descends into Nagoya: Page 236 → Japan stretching up dismal forests vinyl hothouse fields golf courses

without fail the Kii Peninsula Before long— heavy gray smog to the invisible airport to the invisible tomorrow the boom of the jet engine… The earth still turns62 “Altitude 10,700 Meters” provides a disturbing yet familiar description of how people have reshaped Japan's ecosystems. Forests are endangered and in many areas have been replaced with golf courses or fields shrouded in vinyl; murky smog blankets the city and its environs, rendering place invisible and the future unforeseeable. And yet, as the poem affirms, “The earth still turns” (chiky wa sore de mo mawatteiru). On the other hand, resonating through these stanzas, particularly the line “to the invisible tomorrow” (mienai ashita e), is the speaker's claim that everything on the planet, and the planet itself, will be obliterated with the coming of the new millennium.63 While human responsibility for foul air and deforestation is indisputable, the imagined and even potential roles of people in the planet's annihilation are far from clear. Thanks to ever larger arsenals of ever more powerful nuclear weapons, by the time “Altitude 10,700 Meters” was published people had the ability to destroy everything on the earth many times over. But even today, were the planet itself suddenly to explode into nothingness, direct human responsibility for this cataclysm could not immediately be assigned. Sakaki's narrator invokes an obviously extreme and most unlikely scenario, one that clearly did not come to pass in 2000. Yet in juxtaposing the human-induced degradation of Japan with global devastation of unknown origin, “Altitude 10,700 Meters” exposes the large gray area of human responsibility for wrecking ecosystems. It is often relatively simple to determine whether the proximate agents of particular ecological damage are people or the nonhuman: bacteria kill human and nonhuman bodies alike; people and nonhuman bodies kill bacteria. Animals slaughter other animals and occasionally people; people slaughter one another and animals. Nonhuman entities damage ecosystems, as do people. But as texts such as Ch’oe Sngho's “Where Do Sparrows Die,” It Hiromi's “Settling on the Wasteland,” and Sakaki Nanao's “Altitude 10,700 Page 237 →Meters” suggest, the causes of much ecodegradation are harder to explain. And even when immediate agents can be identified, they generally are not the only ones involved. Human behaviors doubtless play a part, but the extent to which they are culpable usually is difficult to determine. The creative works examined in this section, like many others that address damaged ecosystems, hesitate to assign blame, much less rigorously analyze the relative roles of human and nonhuman behaviors in abetting ecodegradation. Instead they pose possibilities, both implicitly and explicitly. Poetry and prose by the East Asian writers Gao Xingjian, Miyazawa Kenji, Bai Ling, Ch’oe Sngho, It Hiromi, and Sakaki Nanao—like writings by many of their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors globally— grapple with some of the countless ambiguities inherent both in identifying human behaviors that damage environments and in evaluating these behaviors and their significance. Other creative works, examined in the second part of this chapter, reveal more clearly the trade-offs that are a constant presence in interactions between people and nonhuman worlds.

Contradictions: Trading Off The Japanese plant immunologist and writer Masuda Mizuko's short story “Dokushinby” (Single Sickness, 1981) concludes with the narrator and her protagonist Fukue, a technician in a research laboratory who conducts experiments on mice, making the case for systematic, predictable bodily replacement: “People and animals lived and died, the numbers completely canceling one another out.”64 This cliché is reassuring but inaccurate. The continued upsurge in both human population and nonhuman extinction has shown that neither intra- nor

interspecies numbers necessarily cancel one another out. Impacts of behaviors on environments, generally more ambiguous than statistics, are even less amenable to such formulas. A hallmark of healthy ecosystems is precisely their ability to juggle numbers and adapt to changes, but that homeostasis is often difficult to maintain. Projects supposedly affording individuals and groups means of offsetting their environmental (especially carbon) footprints have proliferated in recent years, but their efficacy often is questionable; purchasing corporate carbon offsets might allow an individual a measure of carbon neutrality, but even if complete “carbon neutrality” is attained, this does not necessarily translate into overall “environmental neutrality.” One of the most common instances of behavioral ambiguity in literary works that address ecological degradation is how they navigate the inevitable Page 238 →trade-offs in virtually every human interaction with environments. Such texts often depict people as living directly or indirectly to the detriment of nonhuman species and frequently of other people, and nonhuman species as living directly or indirectly to the detriment of other nonhuman species and often of people. Robust bodies generally are presented as requiring even more sacrifice from surrounding ones than their less healthy counterparts. Patterns of suffering are similar: the suffering of one person/group often benefits others, just as that of one nonhuman body often benefits other bodies, human or nonhuman, directly or indirectly. The sections that follow analyze these and analogous trade-offs as they are articulated in a variety of twentieth-century East Asian creative texts. Decreasing Human Numbers, Helping Environments A criticism of some environmental rhetoric is its apparent neglect of human welfare, at least in the short term. Groups, often those not directly involved in drafting policies, are asked to sacrifice in the name of nonhuman health. The sacrifices can be relatively minor, involving bans on consuming products that people prefer but are by no means vital to their survival. Or they can be considerable, including loss of home and livelihood. Creative works such as the Taiwanese writer Topas Tamapima's short story “The Last Hunter,” discussed in Chapter 2, reveal the potential impact of sacrifices on individuals and communities. But while the principal ambiguity of “The Last Hunter” lies in attitudinal conflict (i.e., the lover of nature who believes hunting his prerogative), other texts—including the Taiwanese writer and biologist Jia Fuxiang's essay “Ren yu hai” (People and the Sea)—draw attention to ambiguities inherent in behavioral trade-offs themselves.65 In “People and the Sea,” part of Kan hai de ren (Sea Watchers, 1999) and published just as Taiwan's environmental movements were starting to see results, Jia Fuxiang engages in one of the most controversial forms of ecological discourse: he appeals to people to have fewer children so as to reduce the world's human population, and thus lessen damage to ecosystems. Advocating what some might find liberating but many would deem a considerable sacrifice if not downright offensive, he first assumes that making the world a more hospitable place for people requires remediating and preventing further destruction of environments and states that in his opinion this cannot be accomplished without reducing the birthrate, because human damage to landscapes is directly proportionate not only to per capita consumption but also to the number of consumers. Reducing the birthrate is seen as indispensable Page 239 →to increasing the quality of the lives of both human and nonhuman beings. Jia Fuxiang's “People and the Sea” laments that Hong Kong's Polytechnic University has polluted the once supposedly pristine ocean; like counterparts in Taiwan and Europe, Hong Kong's white beaches now are littered with human debris, from condoms to cooking ranges and sanitary napkins to sofas.66 Jia Fuxiang decries as well the changes over the years in fishing and whaling techniques that have sacrificed millions of fish and nearly wiped out several species of whales, animals that once were “rulers of the sea.”67 He condemns the world's rabid hunger for plastic, acknowledging this substance's seeming indispensability in contemporary life but exposing its encompassing effect on ecosystems: We rarely think that these items, indestructible for centuries, will end up there after we abandon them. Setting aside for a moment the garbage that flows from the land to the sea, large merchant ships toss a thousand pounds of plastic into the ocean every day. The world's naval vessels, merchant ships, fishing boats, offshore oil platforms, and private pleasure boats throw out no less than millions of pounds. Even if the sea were larger, the day will come when it is filled to capacity…Garbage on the

shore can sometimes be cleaned up, but what are we to do about garbage on the bottom of the sea?68

We are reminded of how much remains unknown about the effect of human behaviors on ecosystems; often damage cannot be readily or accurately seen, measured, or calculated. To those who wonder why this matters, Jia Fuxiang asserts that decreased biodiversity negatively affects not just animals but people themselves. He explains the biological and emotional/spiritual functions of these large bodies of water, and he makes a heartfelt plea for the survival of the world's oceans, claiming that human life would lose much of its meaning were it to be deprived of the sentiments triggered by the sea. Like many individuals concerned with the effects of people on ecosystems, Jia Fuxiang calls for changes in behavior. But he goes one step further than most, concluding “People and the Sea” with a plea: “The sea is the home of human beings. This home is already too crowded and too dirty. Have fewer children and do a huge spring cleaning!”69 Noteworthy here is that Jia Fuxiang declares the sea the home of humanity (hai shi renlei de jia), rather than of the nonhuman, or even of both people and nature, despite the obvious fact that people do not actually live in the ocean. In so doing, he stresses not only human perceptions of ownership, perceptions akin to those of the fishers in Ishimure Michiko's Sea of Suffering, but also the pervasiveness of the human Page 240 →imprint on ecosystems. The comment on reducing family size echoes earlier remarks in “People and the Sea” on population; contrasting the relative brevity of human with nonhuman history, Jia Fuxiang notes that the world's human population has spiraled in the twentieth century and claims that there are too many people and too little land: as population increased it became “the crux of the problem.”70 Jia Fuxiang is one of only a small number of environmentalists who actively encourage people to have fewer children for the sake of the planet; many, in fact, do their best to avoid the issue.71 It is significant that he does so in nonfiction, rather than fiction, where—like Ruth Ozeki in My Year of Meats—he could have attributed such sentiments to an imaginary character.72 His entreaty in the final lines of “People and the Sea” could not be more succinct and rational, reinforced as it is by information provided earlier in the essay. People are to prevent increases in human numbers to give more room for nonhuman life, actions that someday might make their own lives more peaceful. Yet the trade-offs this plea demands are significant: people the world over are encouraged to resist dominant familial and social expectations, and frequently their own biological or emotional longings; they are to risk being ostracized from their families and communities for what many would consider little immediate or obvious benefit.73 Increasing Human Numbers, Harming People and Environments Whereas Jia Fuxiang explicitly advocates bringing fewer children into the world, most creative writing concerning overpopulation simply depicts the effect of this phenomenon on human societies. Texts such as the British writer John Brunner's futuristic science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968), for instance, set in the United States in 2010, speak of the horrors of a planet characterized by “densely crowded cities, sudden outbreaks of violence, savage social inequalities and eugenic laws.”74 As Ursula Heise has noted, most novels addressing issues of population growth “focus on the plight of individuals trapped in overcrowded megacities that either extend around the globe or function as a metaphor for a global society that threatens individuality and privacy.”75 Yet a number of creative works on overpopulation address the plights of both people and the nonhuman under such conditions. These include the Korean poet Kim Kwanggyu's “Inwangsan” (Mount Inwang, 1983), written in the early years of Korea's first comprehensive environmental movements. This text depicts people first as living harmoniously within ecosystems dominated by the nonhuman, particularly those of Mount Page 241 →Inwang (lit. Benevolent King Mountain), a major site of Korean shamanism and folk religion in northwestern Seoul once famous for its tigers. “Mount Inwang” laments that people eventually commandeered these spaces and transformed them radically. Rockfaces disappeared, clear streams were replaced by bodies of water littered with broken glass and plastic bags, and air pollution obscured mountains whose surfaces were covered by asphalt roads. As human numbers rose, so too did both human and nonhuman suffering. The speaker compares the fate of Mount Inwang and the nonhuman more generally with that of his aging grandfather: both are literally “imprisoned in the middle of a population of 8 million.”76

“Mount Inwang,” which concludes simply “Pitiful Mount Inwang” (pulssanghan Inwangsan) is fairly straightforward, but other poetry and fiction concerned with rising human populations is more nuanced. Some works address women's contradictory position in ecodegradation. These texts depict women as at once creators and nourishers, damaged by their offspring, and indirect destroyers of the nonhuman, all by creating and nourishing people, who inevitably destroy ecosystems. Creating and nourishing one life is depicted as destroying other life, including that of the individual doing the creating and nourishing. Many people would argue that this is a necessary sacrifice. A small group of literary works suggests otherwise, including the two poems analyzed in this section, written not long after “Mount Inwang”: the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngja's explicitly ecocosmopolitan poem “Kyul e pada e kasstta” (Went to the Sea in Winter, 1984) and the Korean writer Kim Hyesun's implicitly ecocosmopolitan poem “Kkpchil i norae” (Song of Skin, 1985).77 Both Ch’oe Sngja and Kim Hyesun rose to prominence in the 1980s and are celebrated in part for their graphic and at times vulgar evocations of the female body. “Song of Skin” likens nursing to being sucked dry. At the beginning of the poem the speaker remarks that “open lips discover milk / and extract sweet water from my body.” But they do not stop here. The lips almost immediately want to nurse again. And so, “First / the saliva in my mouth dries up / tears vanish from my two eyes / my veins dry up / flowing blood vanishes.” The desiccation of her body is even more pronounced in the second half of the poem, where she complains: My entire body is completely squeezed out even though you throw up everything you've eaten the open lips of you people latch onto my nipples until in the end my entire body is emptied Page 242 → with only bones and skin remaining… until no thoughts rise to the surface and even my spirit withers and dies.78 The reference to “you people” (nhidl) suggests that the speaker is nursing not only her child but multiple individuals, if not society. Nursing metaphorically captures this woman's position in her home and community: constantly nourishing others, she never has the opportunity to replenish her own body. She is drained, physically and emotionally, until nothing but skin and bones remain. “Song of Skin” dramatically portrays women as sacrificing their own bodies for the people around them, regardless of age. At the same time, this text points to some of the broader consequences when women bear and nourish offspring. In the first half of the poem, after indicating that as she nurses her veins dry up and her blood vanishes, the woman declares: “nature [then] collapses / the water of the Naktong River dries up, and the riverbed / hollering a shriek of distress, breaks apart.” Similarly, in the second half of the poem she inserts lines on exploding heavens and galaxies between predictions that her body will be drained until only skin and bones remain and that her mind and spirit will be leached until both disappear: “[you latch onto my nipples] until the heavenly castle splits apart / and the Milky Way shatters.” These lines highlight the narrator's own distress; she feels as though both her body and her universe are being ripped apart. But when taken more literally, the references to landscapes collapsing and a river drying up and its riverbed cracking apart (particularly the Naktong, South Korea's longest, a significant source of drinking water and home to wetlands that provide habitat to endangered species) also indicate what can happen when the very people the woman is nourishing leave her side and extract not milk from their mother but water from rivers, trees from forests, and minerals from mountains. “Song of Skin”—like many texts on

environmental degradation that speak of the earth as literally being sucked dry—depicts nonhuman bodies as being plundered in the same manner as those of nursing women.79 But even as women's bodies suffer like their nonhuman counterparts, they are paradoxically complicit in the latter's distress: women's bodies are precisely what fortify the individuals who violate environments. Kim Hyesun's poem could be read as the planet's own plea for mercy.80 Ch’oe Sngja's poem “Went to the Sea in Winter” addresses not the paradoxes of nursing but instead those of giving birth, a more rapid and dramatic draining, if not emptying of the female body. This graphic exposé of human and nonhuman suffering begins by juxtaposing white birds dropping guano near the polluted sea with a woman's floating corpse ejecting wan offspring: Page 243 → Went to the sea in winter Seagulls mewed and dumped white poop The corpse of a woman drifting for three days was caught by a Coast Guard patrol boat the woman's uterus pointed at the sea, opened to the sea (the polluted sea) From the open uterus sickly, pale children gushed out, staggering, blinded by the sea's bright sun They rode the foam of the waves and scattered to the five continents and six oceans The dead woman lingered as a flabby empty shell drifting like vinyl81 “Went to the Sea in Winter” portrays a woman who is at once a creator and a double casualty. She produces new life even after her own death; it is her corpse, not her living body, that gives birth. Giving birth does not bring about her death, but it converts her already degraded, aimlessly drifting body from a “corpse” (sich’e) into a dehumanized “flabby empty shell” that drifts like vinyl (hmulhmulhan pin kkpttegiro nama / pinil ch’rm ttdolgo isstta). Moreover, the poem strongly implies that the authorities lose interest in the body after the transformation from pregnant corpse to empty shell; the Coast Guard is said to have “caught” the body, but the twelfth line indicates that it continues to drift. The woman is deemed worthy of recovery only when pregnant. The comparison to vinyl suggests that her body/shell has itself chemically altered, perhaps by the polluted sea but also likely even before it entered the water. Reconfiguring East Asian and other stereotypes of women as polluted, “Went to the Sea in Winter” suggests that this woman defiles her own children as well as the sea where she floats.82 And ultimately, through her children, she is in some ways a polluter of landscapes around the world. Ch’oe Sngja's poem depicts the woman's children, after they become adults, as destroying environments; to be sure, they initiate supposedly invincible revolutions, but these appear to arise more from boredom than from conviction, and they have no clear objectives: The children who scattered separately all over the world in South Africa's Pietermaritzburg and Odendaalsrus

they weave tenacious spider webs, in the jungles of the Philippines they peel eggs in the ground, in Berlin, Germany and on the Haussmann boulevards of Paris Page 244 → in the dead of night they spread syphilis, while giving birth to illegitimate children, now and then, on a night so long, so wearisome, they will stir up a revolution invariably, abortive revolutions Went to the sea in winter (the polluted sea).83 “Went to the Sea in Winter” does not speak explicitly of the children who gush out of this woman as eventually themselves polluting ecosystems. But the reference to weaving “tenacious spider webs” (chilgin kmijip l ch’igo) in Pietermaritzburg (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), noted for its timber and aluminum production, and Odendaalsrus (Free State, South Africa), with its long history of gold mining, suggests that as the woman's offspring become adults, they transform lands far from the site of their birth. The mention of peeling eggs in Philippine soil (Pilyulbin i chnggl e s / ttang sok e da al l kkanok’o) intimates that the women's grown children are disturbing natural habitats there. In Paris and Berlin her offspring spread venereal disease and give birth to children who likely will follow the same trajectory as their parents, continuing and expanding the radius of the cycle by scattering to other lands, damaging ecosystems on a vast scale, and bearing ever more children.84 The poem predicts that the children will occasionally stir up revolutions but that these will be unsuccessful. Taking the text full circle and suggesting that very little will be changed, the concluding two lines repeat the title and first and sixth lines of the poem: “Went to the sea in winter / (the polluted sea)” (kyul e pada e kasstta / (oy mdoen pada)). These lines bring the reader back to the beginning: a polluted woman creates new life only to be emptied and abandoned herself; this new life in turn threatens other life. Revolution is unsuccessful. Just as significant, the seas remain polluted. Creative works such as Kim Kwanggyu's “Mount Inwang,” Kim Hyesun's “Song of Skin,” and Ch’oe Sngja's “Went to the Sea in Winter” illuminate some of the trade-offs for people and the nonhuman alike when both the global human population and per capita waste increase. By speaking explicitly not only of the potential traumas to the female body of giving birth and nursing but also of the damage women's offspring inflict on the planet, “Song of Skin” and “Went to the Sea in Winter” argue that producing life damages both people and the nonhuman. In contrast, as examined in the following pages, other creative works focus on trade-offs where one species flourishes at the expense of another, or where a single species is alternately harmed and helped. Page 245 → Helping Environments, Harming Environments Creative works that address human-induced environmental devastation negotiate a variety of trade-offs taking place among nonhuman bodies, everything from replacing one plant with another, or grasslands and forests with cultivated fields, to certain nonhuman species thriving because of the same human behaviors that threaten other nonhuman species, or nonhuman species being reintroduced to a space (e.g., via afforestation) at the expense of other nonhuman species and the overall health of existing ecosystems. Texts that underscore these offsets clearly reveal the ambiguities of human actions vis-à-vis the nonhuman. Most discuss both the contradictory nature of human behaviors toward environments and the problematic effects of these behaviors. Poetry and fiction focusing on behavioral contradictions include the Japanese writer Masuda Mizuko's short story “Tsuno” (Horn, 1995), the Korean writer Hwang Sunwn's short story “Hak” (Cranes, 1953), and the Taiwanese writer Liu Kexiang's brief

verse “Xiwang” (Hope, 1984); creative works calling attention to contradictory impacts include the Chinese writer Jia Pingwa's short story “Linqu” (Songs of the Forest, 1979) and the Taiwanese writer Chen Huang's narrative Gezi Tuoli shi weiyi xiwang (Pigeon Tuoli Is the Only Hope, 1994). Unlike Kim Hyesun's “Song of Skin” and Ch’oe Sngja's “Went to the Sea in Winter,” these texts all feature relatively situated damage to specific ecosystems, and they do not explicitly reach out to other sites or eras. But even though, like Kim Kwanggyu's “Mount Inwang,” they locate themselves in particular times and places, they neither claim nor suggest distinctiveness. In describing conditions akin to those in multiple venues, theirs is a more implicit environmental cosmopolitanism. Masuda's “Horn,” narrated by an employee of the botanical information center in one of Tokyo's municipal parks, brings to light the inconsistent ways people treat different plant species. Much of this fantastical short story focuses on the narrator's own experiences as a single woman who, after being knocked over by a malicious fellow pedestrian, begins growing a horn on her forehead. Her horn allows her to read the minds of those around her, a mixed blessing for someone who before the accident had no interest in the thoughts or feelings of others. Even as her horn begins to wither, the narrator is plagued by prophetic nightmares. “Horn” concludes with her agonizing, “What should I do if my dreams are all prophetic? Sleep brings no rest, and I can't help but have a bad foreboding.”85 Although “Horn” is largely concerned with relationships among people, three of the narrator's experiences at the botanical center stand out because they expose human-instigated trade-offs among nonhuman bodies. Near the Page 246 →beginning of the story the narrator explains that she and her colleagues are responsible for “the upkeep and management of the park's trees, shrubs, and flowering plants.”86 This includes everything from planting, watering, and fertilizing to weeding, trimming, and uprooting, the latter often followed by installing new plants. “Horn” emphasizes that the park is not a place of freely growing vegetation or even one that allows annuals to complete their cycles; instead it is a carefully regulated space, periodically subjected to uprootings and replantings for solely aesthetic reasons. Not surprisingly, certain species of flora are considered weeds and simply discarded. In contrast, the park strives to recycle its more desirable castoffs by offering them to residents of the city. In the final pages of the story, the narrator notes: In preparation for replanting, all flowerbeds in the park, both large and small, are being dug up, and flowers uprooted, extracted, and moved to a spot in front of the information center. A huge quantity of marguerite daisies [a perennial], earth still clinging to them and roots intact, have been piled on the ground in a heap about as tall as a small child. There are several thousand flowers, all of them lying facing in the same direction. The hot sun has been shining on them since morning, so the soil around them has dried, their leaves have lost their moisture, their color is fading, and their weakened stems are bending pliantly. Floating inside our building is the distinct sharp odor that plants give off when they're injured…There is a sign on the wall by the mountain of flowers reading “Please help yourself.” One after another, visitors to the park carry off armfuls of flowers. Now officials have gone out to plant new flowers in the park's empty flower gardens.87 “Horn” describes the flowers as being attacked, first by people and then by the sun; not unlike the nursing/birthing women of Kim Hyesun's “Song of Skin” and Ch’oe Sngja's “Went to the Sea in Winter,” they are gradually stripped of their essence. The text describes transformations in shape, color, and scent as the flowers taken from their plots and the soil that clings to them lose their moisture and crumble away. “Horn” depicts the uprooted marguerites and other flowers as surviving, or at least as being rescued; the narrator notes that by dusk all that remain are some wilted leaves fluttering in the soil. The beds are quickly replanted, this time with beautiful pale purple flowers. Taking into account other evidence in the story, this episode could be read as a metaphor for the narrator's own life; in many ways she too was Page 247 →cast aside by society while in full bloom, or at least while still having considerable potential, abandoned perhaps because she did not conform to often capricious social expectations.

But the flower subplot also spotlights a common characteristic of interactions between people and the natural world: people tend to discard even the most vibrant flora if society's aesthetic vision for a particular space differs from what nature, however manipulated, provides. To be sure, plants are not being replaced by human cultural products such as tennis courts or additional buildings, which in Japan would most likely be libraries, museums, and civic centers.88 Moreover, the uprooted flowers are given another chance at life when eager housewives and commuters scoop up handfuls as they pass by the park.89 These flowers were themselves replacements for an earlier crop; they have no more claim to the flowerbeds than do their predecessors or successors. Yet it is striking how easily and rapidly plants are manipulated to meet human needs. “Horn” reminds the reader that this intervention not only can involve destroying nonhuman bodies but also can entail a much less obvious but often equally significant maneuver: substituting one nonhuman body for another. Much of the nonhuman is disrupted as human color preferences change with the seasons. Ultimately, however, “Horn” reveals the park's treatment of plants as ambiguous on an even more fundamental level: the behaviors of park officials toward trees differ from their behaviors toward flowers. Whereas healthy, blooming flowers are removed, tree branches are allowed to grow in whatever direction they please, leaves and twigs remain where they fall, and tree parasites are left to enjoy the resulting buffet.90 Early in “Horn” the narrator describes an irate woman coming to her office to complain about unfamiliar red swellings on the leaves of the park's evergreen witch hazel. The woman had thought the bumps so beautiful that she took home some leaves. But cutting into them, she was shocked to discover that these were no decorative growths: “I cut it to find out just what kind of fruit it is. Insects poured out one after the other. They kept coming and coming. I was horrified.…What the hell is this?”91 The narrator calmly explains that these are insect galls (outgrowths of plant tissue usually caused by parasites), which can almost be taken for granted on evergreen witch hazel. Becoming even more irate, the woman demands to know whether the evergreen/insect relationship is symbiotic or parasitic. When the narrator admits that theirs could be considered “a one-way parasitic relationship” the woman's outrage intensifies: Why can't you just fumigate and kill all the insects? I took this leaf from this park. To have aphids feeding in a public park? How is this Page 248 →acceptable? Now the flowerbeds on my veranda are terribly infected. It's unsanitary. Doesn't this bother you?92 The woman demands that the city do to the insects precisely what she condemns the insects for doing, namely, kill living things. She also complains that the city is planting trees but not maintaining them as she believes it should: “Do you think you can just plant trees anywhere you like and go merrily about your business? Recently you haven't even been cleaning up the leaves that have fallen from roadside trees. The same is true about pruning and spraying insecticides. And I've already heard your line on being short-staffed, so don't even start with me.”93 Having finished her rant, the woman leaves the building without giving the narrator the opportunity to respond. The narrator claims this woman had just wanted someone to listen to her grievances. But her criticism of park officials is revealing: the same individuals who micromanage flowers apparently let trees do as they please; while flowers are uprooted if they do not coincide with a particular color scheme or have reached their natural peak, trees can host obvious parasites, drop leaves, and extend limbs—in other words can both themselves be violated by parasites and overstep what some might regard as their proper boundaries— without a second glance from the authorities. Calls for pruning, removal, and extermination are met with silence. These differences in behavior can be easily explained. Some disparities result primarily from structural differences: it is much easier to replace flowers than it is trees, and since the insect galls do not appear to be harming the evergreen witch hazel (which blooms early and often looks like forsythia), park officials would have little motivation to replace these with trees less likely to become infested. Other disparities result primarily from variations in scope: the plants in the park's flowerbeds are more easily managed than the millions of trees that grow across town. But additional circumstances are also at play. Although the grumbling woman is horrified that the trees on her veranda are infected with insect galls, the only reason they trouble her is that she knows what lies inside; she took leaves home and cut open the bodies attached to them. And the only reason she brought leaves home and cut open their lumps is that she thought the latter looked beautiful. In other words beauty, or perceived beauty, has a more powerful effect on behavior than does concern for the nonhuman. It is only when these lumps

turn out to be clusters of insects that they are declared parasitical and are stripped of their beauty. “Horn” reveals the predictable randomness in how people treat the nonhuman. This short story depicts nonhuman bodies as being easily exchanged: the survival Page 249 →of any one entity depends on perceptions of its appropriateness for a particular human-defined space. Hwang Sunwn's short story “Cranes” describes similar contradicting behaviors toward animals, featuring two young men who capture, amuse themselves with, and then liberate a crane, only to resume crane hunting.94 Written by one of twentieth-century Korea's most celebrated authors in January 1953 and published in May 1953, just months before the armistice that brought a temporary end to the Korean War (July 1953), “Cranes” anticipates the many Korean creative works that expose the green paradox of the space designated as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ): as described in Chapter 1, the DMZ, established as part of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, is both the world's most fortified border region and, until recent years and largely by chance, one of its great ecological preserves. Hwang Sunwn's story centers on the relationship between Sngsam and Tkjae, two young men who were close childhood friends in North Korea, but after Sngsam's recent defection to the South find themselves on opposing sides. During the Korean War (1950–53) Tkjae was captured by southern forces just north of the 38th parallel. After recognizing him as his former companion, Sngsam, now a member of the South's Public Peace Corps, has volunteered to take him to Ch’ngdan (a city in western Korea, slightly north of the 38th parallel), where he will be imprisoned. Early in their journey the two stop to look at cranes in nearby fields: “In the center of the field, resembling people with bent backs and wearing white clothing, was without doubt a flock of cranes. This place had become the 38th parallel's demilitarized zone. Even though people no longer lived there, cranes still did, as before.”95 Echoing much literature that contrasts people with nature, the text here depicts human societies as fleeting and the natural world as enduring. Seeing these cranes triggers a childhood memory. When they were about twelve, Sngsam and Tkjae trapped a Tanjng crane. They tied it up, binding even its wings, and they visited it daily to pet and ride it. When rumors began to spread that a man was coming from Seoul with the permission of the governor-general to shoot cranes as specimens, the boys were terrified that the crane they had captured would be among those killed. So without a second thought they untied the bird and encouraged it to fly away. At first the animal was so weak it could barely walk, and its initial attempt at flight was unsuccessful, but before long it flew off to freedom: “[It] stretched its long neck, let out a cry, flew up into the sky, swept in a circle over the heads of the two boys, and vanished into the distance. For a long time the boys could not tear their eyes away from the blue sky [p’urn hanl e s] where their crane had disappeared.”96 Sngsam Page 250 →and Tkjae are mesmerized by the animal, and especially by its rapid disappearance, after a final circling above its captors, into the firmament. This memory is complemented several paragraphs later by the story's final sentence, which takes place in the present: “Just in time two or three Tanjng cranes, spreading out their huge wings, went soaring leisurely through the clear autumn sky [nopp’urn kal hanl e k’n nalgae rl p’ygo yuyuhi nalgo isstta].”97 Repeating the image of cranes flying through clear sky, albeit not one bird but several and not disappearing into the heavens but instead advertising their freedom by spreading out their large wings, flying leisurely (yuyuhi), and remaining visible, Hwang Sunwn's story implicitly contrasts the fate of Tkjae, who is being led off to prison, with the seeming freedom animals enjoy.98 More generally, it contrasts the arduous lives of the Korean people with the apparently more tranquil lives of the peninsula's animals, at least those able to evade ropes and rifles. But Hwang Sunwn's story also gives important insights into the frequently contradictory ways people treat animals. As children, S ngsam and Tkjae snare a crane and tie it up, harnessing even its wings. Unable to move, the crane sits alone except for Sngsam and Tkjae's daily visits. These visits cannot be enjoyable for the animal, which initially must carry the boys around on its back and then appears too weak to do even this; that the bird can barely walk when the boys set it free suggests that it has been some time since it has carried them anywhere. The boys show concern for the crane only when they believe its life is at stake; the narrator sympathetically depicts Sngsam and Tkjae as so worried that the shooter from Seoul will reach the crane before they do that they hurry to turn the animal loose, “[not caring] whether the adults found out and scolded them. All they could think about was their crane dying.”99 The crane is granted its freedom, freedom the boys know they should not have taken away in the first place, precisely because the animal's life is so obviously in danger; unable to fly with its wings bound, the bird would have been easy prey for the visitor from Seoul.100

But in fact it already was easy prey—the crane's life was in danger from its first day of confinement. Anyone could have stumbled on the bound animal and killed it while Sngsam and Tkjae were otherwise occupied. It is also likely that being held in captivity greatly reduced the crane's lifespan but that its deterioration would have been gradual enough to go unnoticed before becoming irreversible. The narrator remarks that once untied the crane could barely walk, and although it eventually manages to fly away, it is un-clear how far it can travel. Reversing their behavior, Sngsam and Tkjae first capture and then release an animal, taking away its freedom and threatening its life only to return the former and give new lease on the latter. The Page 251 →boys do so even as their feelings toward the bird remain the same. They are fascinated by it and do not want it to die, even though they are the ones who from the start have put it at risk. “Cranes” demonstrates how readily an individual's behaviors toward the same animal can contradict and perhaps even cancel each other out. Rehabilitation looks possible, at least if begun in a timely manner. On the other hand, having the adult Sngsam and Tkjae interrupt their journey to Ch’ngdan to try to catch another crane suggests that the two have learned little from their previous experiences. They know, or can imagine, what it feels like to be bound. And yet they show no qualms about attempting to inflict this condition on animals. Hwang Sunwn's story ends on a positive note, at least for the cranes, which show no signs of descending from the clear autumn sky and seem well out of reach of the two childhood friends. But it is uncertain how much longer these birds will be able to escape human clutches. The next soldiers to venture by these fields might be more successful than Hwang Sunwn's two protagonists. Revealing even greater contradictions of human behaviors toward birds, and the nonhuman more generally, are texts that expose not contradictory treatment of a particular species but instead the ambiguity of attempts to “green” environments.101 Many, like Liu Kexiang's “Hope,” suggest that environmentally “friendly” actions are accompanied by or even inspire behaviors likely to harm the nonhuman.102 Taiwan's preeminent nature writer, Liu Kexiang is known especially for his narratives on the island's birds, and in “Hope” he speaks briefly of his vision of the future habitats of these animals. This short poem reads simply: One year there finally will be a spring when our children and grandchildren can read the following front-page story: Birds and small ducks are returning north from their winter migration Vehicles passing by the Danshui River are forbidden to sound their horns.103 “Hope” was published in the mid-1980s, when the Danshui River—which flows from the mountains of Taiwan's Xinzhu County through Taoyuan County, Taipei, and into the Taiwan Strait—suffered from significant pollution.104 The narrator does not specify how the conditions described in the anticipated front-page article differ from present circumstances, conditions he suggests through his use of the word “finally” (zhongyu) that have long Page 252 →been anticipated. But it seems he believes that in a generation or two the area will have been sufficiently restored for birds and small ducks to return; their presence suggests that other species also might find a welcome home or at least a temporary resting place on the river's banks. It is also likely that vehicles passing through areas with considerable bird populations will be newly prohibited from honking their horns, the highly anticipated return of several avian species having triggered even more stringent environmental regulations. At the same time that it references temporally pervasive damage, “Hope” expresses dreams for future generations and for their soundscapes in particular. The speaker's vision sounds ideal: honking birds replacing honking horns. Interestingly, however, the poem says nothing about reducing vehicular traffic along the Danshui. In fact, if ducks and other birds have recently returned to the region, traffic might even increase, fueled by people's desire to gawk at these newly returned animals. And the potential damage caused by auto exhaust aside, sounds from increased traffic could conceivably off-set the decrease in noise brought about by prohibiting the use of vehicular horns. Indeed, the poem remains silent concerning what many environmentalists would consider a significant piece of the

puzzle, one that if not acted on risks undermining the improvements that have been made to the river's ecosystems: without reducing the number of vehicles on the road, bird populations will continue to be threatened and could once again disappear. Although “Hope” itself is relatively optimistic and does not explore these possibilities, readers aware of the fates of other recently rehabilitated spaces might pause to consider the significance of the loud silences inherent in this text. Whereas Masuda's “Horn,” Hwang Sunwn's “Cranes,” and Liu Kexiang's “Hope” point to the contradictory nature of human behaviors toward environments, Jia Pingwa's “Songs of the Forest” and Chen Huang's Pigeon Tuoli bring out the ambiguous results of such behaviors. “Songs of the Forest” initially seems to depict a clear case of ecocontradiction. This work, by one of China's most popular and prolific authors and a leading writer of rootsseeking literature, opens with a description of a seemingly unsullied mountain area, the Small River, where “the river water is extremely clear, so clear you can see the rocks, the shadows of fish on the rocks, and if you throw in a pebble you can see the reflection of trees trembling drunkenly.”105 But the narrator also reveals that the surrounding mountains are devoid of trees; he and his colleagues have been assigned to reforest the land-scape, which likely was denuded during the Cultural Revolution: “We all agreed that the water here was good, as were the people [zher shui hao, ren hao], but this would be a truly good place [nei zhen jiao ge hao difang le] if Page 253 →the mountains once again sent forth forests [shanshang ruguo zai zhangchu shulin]!”106 Indicating that the mountainsides once were home to groves of trees, the narrator nevertheless does not specify why the landscape lost its forests—whether this was the result of a “natural” blight such as fire from lightning, of human actions like incessant logging, or possibly of a nebulous intertwining of human and nonhuman behaviors. Also important is the phrase “if the mountains once again sent forth forests,” indicating that however much people attempt to repair the landscape, it is from the mountains that vegetation ultimately must sprout. The narrator reveals that since the land will be seeded from the sky, he and his comrades must build an airfield, houses, and other structures for the workers. Remediating spaces by planting trees necessitates reshaping of other spaces; the human footprint on environments extends well beyond the new groves of trees, both vertically (airplanes above deforested ground) and horizontally (airfields and houses adjacent to these spaces). This construction does not seem to disturb the people who live nearby. They are delighted that outsiders have come to their village; more workers means more clothing to be washed, profiting local women. One of the villagers confesses her disappointment that the airfield is so close to completion; she wishes construction would continue for another two years. At the same time, there is no real desire to forestall the arrival of airplanes. The locals are excited to see these craft overhead, children especially. Yet the final lines of Jia Pingwa's story suggest that despite local excitement, this construction and in particular the machinery it brings to the region entail more ominous consequences; the “songs of the forest” (linqu) change from those of girls playing and women doing laundry to the roar of machines on the ground and overhead. The story concludes: “I couldn't distinguish the rumbling sounds coming from the airfield. Which were the sounds of tractors? Which were the sounds of bulldozers? Had they also heard the voices of these children?”107 This final question is rhetorical, since children's voices were easily overwhelmed by the racket of tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment. The landscape where the men are working had an audible human presence even before their arrival, one that appears to have been stronger than the presence of the nonhuman. In his description of the river, cited above, the narrator focuses solely on how it looks to the naked eye and on how people are interacting with it; he says nothing about the sounds it makes or those emanating from animals living within it. But now one human sound-scape is gradually being drowned out by another. Other changes are less clear. The men release seeds above hillsides to restore them, to make these “truly great places.” Ensuing compromises, including changes to noise levels, Page 254 →likely are not few. Portraying ecological destruction amid reconstruction, Jia Pingwa's narrative presents a complicated picture of interspecies nonhuman trade-offs: trees are planted but only at the expense of other species. Articulating related phenomena yet focusing more closely on nonhuman dynamics is Chen Huang's Pigeon Tuoli.108 This volume of essays by one of Taiwan's premier nature writers centers on the adventures of Tuoli, a pigeon that abandons the relative security of its coop to live in “wilderness” that has been subjected to substantial human damage. In the volume's preface Chen Huang explains: “Through the adventures and course [maoxian

licheng] of a pigeon named Tuoli I have sought to show the twists and turns [bozhe] of a life in the wild, as well as the fond dreams [meimeng] pursued. It is reality [zhenshi] and also fantasy [huanxiang]. Pigeon Tuoli is reality; the circumstances that occur [fasheng de qingjing] are also reality. But the fantasy has to do with the connotation [neihan] and significance [yiyi] of nature and the wilderness [ziran huangye].”109 Itself contradictory, indicating at once that the environmental conditions depicted are “real” but their connotations and significance are “fantasy,” this statement prepares the reader for the ambiguities that follow. Championing environmental preservation, in the preface Chen Huang also consistently laments the fact that many urban residents have little meaningful contact with wildlife. They watch television in isolated air-conditioned rooms and know wilderness only through electronic images. However moving, these virtual images generally cannot compete with economic growth and the allure of more comfortable lifestyles; even people fascinated by the nonhuman often do not want to experience it directly. And so, Chen Huang argues, “Industrialists invest in the wilderness and transform it into tourist amusement areas…There have been many brutal instances of systematically exploiting wilderness and expanding recreation spaces for people's enjoyment.”110 Since most people have not experienced environmental catastrophe, they cannot understand the importance of minimizing the human impact on ecosystems, especially ecosystems outside urban centers. Chen Huang claims that composing the essays in his collection was enjoyable in many ways. But he admits that he still feels “helpless in face of the difficulties admitting the harm civilized society has inflicted on wilderness.”111 Writing in the mid-1990s, he expresses many of the same concerns as the protagonist of Topas Tamapima's “The Last Hunter,” who fears that the forests near his home will be compromised even more severely after being designated recreation areas. “Gezi Tuoli zhi yi” (Pigeon Tuoli, Part 1, 1990), the first essay in Pigeon Tuoli, paints a slightly different picture of interactions among people Page 255 →and environments from that offered in the volume's preface.112 Chen Huang cites numerous examples of deliberate or inadvertent damage to the natural world. Yet the essay's title character, although not particularly excited about its vocation of performing acrobatics for people, seeks freedom from its cage only after considerable negotiation. Unlike the captured birds in Huang Chunming's story “Set Free” and Hwang Sunwn's story “Crane,” Tuoli the pigeon is not depicted as suffering while under human care. Food is plentiful, and the bird comes and goes from its pen whenever it desires. Although the essay concludes with Tuoli deciding the time has come to leave the coop permanently, “Pigeon Tuoli” reveals human relationships with the nonhuman as more complicated than the volume's introduction suggests. Interested in the experiences of animals that live in the wild, Tuoli listens avidly to the stories they share about human invasion of the wilderness and consequent environmental damage. The bird also flies over nearby landscapes, observing this degradation himself. Hunters set bird and other traps hundreds of meters long, capturing numerous species including those that are nearly extinct; loggers work in droves to deforest acres of land so that it can be used for agriculture; truckers deposit mounds of urban garbage on hillsides; high-voltage boxes electrocute birds that use them as perches and electric shocks render frogs unconscious; and the mountain deer have disappeared even from Deer Hut (Luliao; ), a site named in their honor. The examples of environmental degradation listed in “Pigeon Tuoli” are all too familiar. Tuoli's reactions, on the other hand, are notable but not unexpected considering the dependence of this species on people. Far from being outraged at the human incursion, the pigeon almost seems pleased. This bird associates people with food: The gray starlings, hawks, and falcons had protested [the degradation of their environments], but people seemed as though they were still sticking to their old ways. Pigeon Tuoli perhaps was worried that it soon would lose some feathered friends, but it wasn't so much concerned about people spoiling the hills. At least it didn't have to be anxious about running out of food.113 Similarly, rather than being outraged when it discovers there are no mountain deer at Deer Hut, no traces of deer, nor any memory of deer even among the most senior pigeons, Tuoli hypothesizes that there might not have been any deer to begin with: “In Pigeon Tuoli's small mind, if even people didn't leave records [of deer having lived here] then the appearance of mountain deer perhaps in truth was only a beautiful legend.”114 Considering not only Page 256 →how much damage is revealed but also the tenor of Chen Huang's introduction, Tuoli—at least as

depicted by the narrator—is quite unconcerned with how people are reshaping the terrain outside its coop. Even more intriguing are Tuoli's apprehensions about and reasons—immediate and enduring—for flying away. Having spent much if not all of its life as a domestic pigeon, and seeming to believe itself already relatively free, it understandably finds it difficult to make a final break with human society.115 The fact that the “wilderness” now is replete with obvious human traces makes it more appealing to an animal that has spent its life among people. This perhaps is part of the dream to which Chen Huang refers in the preface: the bird's perceptions of nature and wilderness appear to be largely fantastical when compared with the degradation of these spaces. But also at play are factors that highlight Tuoli's isolation from the other birds and complicate the human/nonhuman binary Chen Huang establishes in the preface. Part of what motivates Tuoli's departure is simple boredom; the bird is perhaps too comfortable, with food always available and a roof to protect it from the rain. Tuoli wonders if there is not more to existence. Its human handlers are at least partially responsible for the tedium of its life. But apart from making it repeat the same acrobatic routine, the people who feed and house it do not have much control over how it spends his days; Tuoli roams at will and flies wherever it wishes.116 It is the bird's choice to return to the coop every night. Also motivating Tuoli to liberate himself is the fear of being labeled spineless. Pigeons already appear to be the laughingstock of the avian community. Their diet is a frequent target; sparrows, even as they feed freely from the pigeons’ food supply, ridicule these birds for eating “monotonous manmade fare.” Thrushes too mock the pigeons’ diet. The narrator comments, “What most saddened Tuoli was how its completely wild neighbors were fond of loudly poking fun at the pigeons for not earning their own food and hinting that manmade feed just didn't compare with what was available everywhere in the wild—tasty, delicious insects.”117 Tuoli decides to leave the coop to prove to birds of other species that pigeons are strong enough to survive in the wild. Few birds believe the pigeon can accomplish this feat. They claim that no pigeon ever has tried to do so, and many taunt Tuoli for its efforts. This is not to say that the wilderness itself holds no appeal for the pigeon protagonist. There are times when it feels its magnetism. For instance, watching adult barbets teach their young how to find insects, Tuoli experiences a “strange feeling of identification spontaneously rise up inside. It had never felt anything like this.”118 But recognizing that it might be romanticizing a life it scarcely knows, Tuoli immediately asks, “Was life in the outdoors really Page 257 →so fascinating?”119 Believing nature not nearly as captivating as others have made it out to be, it determines not to leave permanently but instead to make short trips away from home to see if it can adapt to a new environment. But then a fortuitous encounter with an extraordinary bird that literally becomes one with the wilderness, rather than a deep-seated desire to separate itself from human society, prompts Tuoli to make the final break. The essay concludes with Tuoli so captivated by the sight of a beautiful green pigeon flying away and merging into the foliage that it decides to do the same. “Wilderness” draws it in, or at least the fantasy of becoming one with a wilderness that absorbs such a seductive bird: As Pigeon Tuoli gazed at the green pigeon's departing silhouette, it suddenly was deeply attracted by the animal's not looking back, its insistent primitiveness and wild nature [jianzhi de yuanshi he yexing]! This was the most beautiful view of an animal's back that Tuoli had ever seen. The green pigeon quickly merged into the hues of the rainy wilderness; it and the wilderness were almost an organic whole [nei jihu shi yu huangye yiti de]. At that moment Tuoli decided on something. The pigeon therefore immediately spread out its damp wings, and disregarding the rapid and intense rain it launched its body and soared into the sky.120 This is not the first time Tuoli has taken off and flown far. But earlier episodes ended in its return to the coop, to which it was “drawn back by an invisible force,” a force not unlike the eventual magnetism of the wilderness.121 It is unclear at the conclusion of this section of Pigeon Tuoli whether this time will be any different, whether the pigeon will again change its mind and, losing sight of its green inspiration, once more return to life among people.

The narrator makes no apology for the havoc people have wreaked on the ecosystems surrounding the pigeon's pen, but complicating his picture of unrestrained ecodegradation is the figure of Tuoli itself—a bird that in many ways benefits from the human presence, that alternately is drawn to its familiar home and to the “wilderness,” or at least the fantasy of wilderness. In fact, it suggests that the latter space has become more appealing precisely because of its increased human presence. Trade-offs, whether in behaviors, effects of behaviors, or both, are a hallmark of human interactions with environments. Whatever the intent, most of Page 258 →these contacts involve both helping and harming the natural world, directly and indirectly; offsets can also occur among nonhuman bodies or within a single body. Impacts on people from human behaviors and from nonhuman acts display similar dynamics. Advances in the life sciences have shown that processes of trading off are exceptionally complicated. But the more that is known the more difficult it becomes to determine how profoundly individuals and societies have a bearing on environmental health. The diverse texts examined in this section show how often literature grapples with these issues and the multiple ways it does so. It also points to the contingencies inherent in assessing behaviors and the environmental changes these behaviors inflict, and it shows how much these assessments depend on social, temporal, and physical standards.

Assessing Assessments of Behaviors Believing his days numbered, the speaker of the Korean writer Ko n's poem “Nunmul han pangul” (A Single Teardrop, 1974) laments that he has failed to comfort even the smallest nonhuman bodies. He declares that he hates leaving the world in such a desultory state: I have lived without being able to comfort even a single insect… I have lived without being able to comfort even a single plant of knotgrass… I have lived without being able to comfort even a single brook… When I turn around and look at this world it's so dreary that I don't want to leave.122 “A Single Teardrop” is mainly a tribute to the speaker's wife, and the speaker's discourse on failing to comfort insects, knotgrass, and creeks is easily read as a couched reference to his belief that he has failed to show his spouse even the smallest kindness. But if taken more literally, the poem also reveals regret about not having done more for the nonhuman. Ko n's poem points to the ambiguousness of assessing human behaviors and how these behaviors affect people and the natural world. Depicting his impotence as a given, the speaker does not explain why he thinks he has been unable to comfort (wirohada) a single plant, animal, or geological body. Interesting as well is his silence on whether he has actively harmed the nonhuman, whether he attempted to comfort nature and failed, or whether Page 259 →he did not even try. More important, the poem's speaker leaves unclear why he believes it his duty to console. Commenting on the world's “dreariness” (sslsslhada), he elsewhere indicates why he thinks people and the non-human need consolation, but he does not specify why he personally feels remorse for not having acted. The speaker is silent about the standards by which he judges his behaviors and their effects on environments. A number of creative works that address people's relationships with the nonhuman, and particularly human damage to ecosystems, go one step further by drawing attention to the contingencies on which assessments of environmental degradation are based. Assessments can be made by analyzing statistics and scientifically gathered data, but literature offers another set of perspectives on how to evaluate environmental damage. Revealing the frequent arbitrariness of nonscientific appraisals of human behaviors, creative texts expose the extent to which

evaluations of damage to people and nature both rely on and vary according to social, temporal, and physical standards of the normal. Normality, in turn, is based on previous observation or exposure to discourse; we often evaluate damage based on what we a priori assume we should find, not on absolute standards. Standards The standards of individuals and groups from the local to the global—standards often based on available knowledge, past experiences and practices, and cultural codes (legal, religious, etc.)—provide the basis for most determinations about the significance of environmental degradation found in literary texts. For ecological harm even to be recognized, much less managed, we need to determine not only how ecosystems have been transformed but also that these changes constitute damage. The natural world is not identified as having been anthropogenically compromised until it is established that it has changed significantly; that people have played a notable role in enacting these changes; and that the changes are harmful. All three determinations rely on some combination of temporal standards: understandings of what constitutes a “natural” rate of change; physical standards: perceptions of what comprises a “manipulated” as opposed to a “natural” environment, a “compromised” as opposed to a “healthy” environment; and social standards: norms of appropriate human behavior and effects on particular species or other subsets of the nonhuman. Concluding that the nonhuman has changed significantly is usually the simplest and least arbitrary undertaking. But even this determination depends to some degree on standards. As certain of the texts analyzed in this Page 260 →chapter reveal, in addition to physical standards, time is often a key variable. Since ecosystems change constantly regardless of human behaviors, deciding whether changes are significant often is based on how quickly they take place. Even when the total land area affected is identical, gradual expansion of cities into spaces with low or no human population generally receives far less notice, not to mention criticism or celebration, than rapid spread. Judgments as to what constitutes rapid as opposed to gradual development vary depending on perspectives: long-term residents of a city that has been slowly widening its borders for years might barely notice the deforesting of several additional hectares, whereas recent arrivals from rural areas that have experienced little urban encroachment might argue that forests are being rapidly cleared and that environmental degradation is significant. Creative works discussed earlier in this chapter show the second determination—the role of people—as relatively straightforward, but it can also be problematic. Even in cases where human involvement is obvious, the deep intermingling of human behaviors and nonhuman phenomena makes it difficult to judge the relative changes people inflict on landscapes. For example, when a single misplaced ski triggers an avalanche, the skier is the immediate cause of snow plummeting down the mountainside, destroying trees, and burying animals and occasionally people in its path.123 But an avalanche also needs a highly unstable arrangement of snow, something that usually develops without human involvement. Most avalanches are not induced by people; at best, the skier might have merely accelerated this “natural” event. On the other hand, human-induced climate change has been implicated in increasing the likelihood of avalanches in certain spaces: the skier easily could have speeded an event stemming from anthropogenic atmospheric changes. Suppositions about human involvement in transformations of environments rely largely on physical standards, ideas of what constitutes the “natural” condition of everything from a particular nonhuman body to a broad landscape. When parts of the natural world look “abnormal,” human behaviors often are presumed to be involved. Assessing the precise role people play in changing environments is likely to become more difficult as more is understood about all that underlies environmental change. For instance, it may be only a matter of time before industrial nations are held accountable for flooding halfway around the world caused by rising sea levels resulting directly from global warming. The third determination—that changes are harmful—seems simple but often is the most difficult and arbitrary, relying as it usually does on both physical and social standards. Sensory evidence can be overwhelming: belching smokestacks, roaring trucks, malodorous and discolored bodies of water, suspiciously textured and odd tasting crops. But the effects of these changes Page 261 →on human and nonhuman bodies are often highly contested. Thus, a corporation is more likely to admit to changing environments than it is to declare these changes detrimental to people and the nonhuman realm; a government or corporate board might not be able to deny that a

factory's emissions are blackening the skies, and that people and animals living in close proximity to this factory disproportionately contract serious diseases, but persistent lobbying and conclusive scientific evidence are generally required to force an admission that these blackened skies actually caused the diseases (i.e., a government or corporate board would see the smoke as coincidental, not causative). After human damage to environments has been determined, even more complex questions arise as to its justifiability. Millions of people worldwide as well as untold numbers of animals and plants suffer from various pollution-induced conditions. Many have argued that this suffering is justified by the jobs and products that polluting industries provide, no small number of which ease human and sometimes nonhuman suffering. Standards as to what constitute appropriate human behaviors toward the nonhuman regularly ambiguate accusations of environmental degradation. Physical Standards Numerous creative works weighing the import of human damage to environments reveal the relationship of assessments to physical standards. They do so in two particularly intriguing ways: by portraying landscapes as defying, even directly contradicting expectations; and by describing nonhuman beings that maintain their identities even after they have been radically transformed. These texts probe how assessments of behaviors, and especially of the impacts of behaviors, relying as they do on physical appearance, can vary considerably according to the standards used in evaluating this appearance. They also suggest the extent to which assessments of environmental degradation, difficult enough to make because of the coexistence of thriving and struggling nonhuman bodies, can be further complicated and compromised by fluctuations in standards. Narrators and characters often highlight those parts of landscapes that diverge from expectations. Two revealing examples are the Japanese writer Masuda Mizuko's “Kemuri” (Smoke, 1995) and the Korean writer Yu Hynjong's “Pimujang chidae” (Demilitarized Zone, 1964). At first sight the two stories make an unlikely couple: the former speaks of changes to ecosystems in Tokyo after the passage of new garbage-bag regulations, while the latter addresses environmental changes in Korea's DMZ after its transformation from a space of villages and farms into one of the most dangerous places Page 262 →on earth. But “Smoke” and “Demilitarized Zone” demonstrate alternate perspectives on diverging from expectations and downplaying conformity to them. While the narrator of “Smoke” tries to minimize the ecological benefits of using the new garbage bags by emphasizing the harm they cause, the narrator of “Demilitarized Zone” attempts to downplay the dangers of the demilitarized zone by emphasizing just how many species can thrive in an area nearly bereft of people. In both stories, efforts to play down how spaces conform to expectations reveal the relative arbitrariness of assessing injuries to environments. Among the most thought-provoking creative works about the ambiguities of human changes to environments are those that expose people's misguided attempts to “green” their surroundings. Many of these literary texts negotiate the very real trade-offs—between human and nonhuman health, or between the health of individual nonhuman bodies or nonhuman species—inherent in implementing environmental policies. Others, like Masuda's short story “Smoke,” stress not trade-offs but inefficacies: narrators demonstrate how earlier behaviors are modified or counteracted, but with potentially negligible and even negative consequences to ecosystems.124 What makes “Smoke” stand out is the narrator's disproportionate emphasis on backpedaling by Tokyo citizens when faced with policies intended to improve environmental health. Their evasiveness obviously mocks attempts to reduce the human impact on ecosystems. But in the context of “Smoke” and similar creative works it also shows up the potential bias of attempts to mock such efforts. “Smoke” centers on Ginko, a young woman several years out of a brief but troubled marriage who is fascinated with garbage bags. The text begins with her buying a package of bags and wrapping herself in them after being knocked down the stairs to her apartment by a man who then laughed at her as she lay on the ground; “Smoke” concludes with the woman in her bath, enveloped in water, but feeling as though she is inside a garbage bag. Masuda's story is not environmentally oriented per se, but it does interweave important subplots related to human changes to ecosystems; “Smoke” is an excellent example of a creative work that addresses significant environmental concerns while containing very few if any references to the nonhuman. One of the text's important subplots ridicules Tokyo's new garbage regulations; another mocks a “recycling zealot” who benefits from the noncompliance of residents with these regulations.

Early in “Smoke” the narrator notes that beginning in January 1994 Tokyo's garbage collectors accepted only semitransparent calcium carbonate bags. Officials claimed that calcium carbonate lessened the damage the bags inflicted on the city's incinerators and that semitransparent bags made Page 263 →garbage safer. Since contents would be more visible, people were believed to be more likely to sort their garbage according to city regulations, which include separating out recyclables and nonburnables. Moreover, as Ginko learns from a television program she watches shortly after extricating herself from the garbage bags, these new containers make it more difficult to dispose of criminal evidence. The newscaster explains that a suburban housewife alerted authorities to a bag at her local collection site that was coated inside with bloody streaks; upon investigating, the police discovered that the bag and others in the neighborhood contained the remains of a human body. On the other hand, when incinerated, these bags are said to increase ash production, and they provoke an allergic skin reaction in some individuals, including Ginko. Moreover, the narrator mentions that the city reassured residents that if they wanted to dispose of items they did not wish others to see, they should wrap them in cloth or paper. “Smoke” suggests that with some advance planning people can discard almost exactly what they did before, even the dismembered corpses of crime victims. In fact, meticulous criminals can use these new bags to their advantage because semitransparency creates the illusion of innocence. Most strikingly, the new bags become near death traps for traumatized and disturbed individuals. Walking around her apartment gathering trash and frustrated that as a woman living alone she cannot possibly fill such a large garbage bag in the brief time between trash collection days, Ginko climbs into the bag herself. Its effects are mesmerizing: “Being wrapped inside was surprisingly nice. The lower half of her body grew warm, her tension released.”125 So she pulls another bag over her head and finds this even more relaxing, but she soon is nearly smothered; it is the knowledge that plastic suffocates, rather than any alarming physical symptoms, that eventually prompts her to free herself: “What the hell am I doing?” Ginko muttered to herself. Her mind was hazy, as though she’d been asleep. Still she made no move to extricate herself from the bag. She felt strangely comfortable…Although her breathing sounded rough, in fact there was no indication that it was labored. Even so, whether the bag was calcium carbonate or ordinary plastic didn't matter, being covered in it for long would result in suffocation.…Ginko wished she could tie up the top of the bags with string and sit still inside for hours on end.126 Masuda's story gives an extreme example of how the materials designed to regulate waste disposal and increase recycling are potentially quite harmful Page 264 →to people. But this scenario works in concert with earlier references in “Smoke” to increased skin irritation and even more significantly ash pollution to show the disparity between the positive motivations behind promoting these containers and their actual negative effects on environments. Yet in highlighting the ambiguous overall effect of the new garbage bags on environments “Smoke” disproportionately emphasizes their dangers. The bags are exposed not only as provoking allergic skin reactions and increasing certain types of contamination, common criticisms of many new materials, but also as harboring murdered bodies and as potential death traps for those not familiar with their properties. The narrator does not balance exposés of the extreme harm these bags can cause with discussion of how they can reduce environmental problems. She simply cites the official claim that these bags are easier on the city's incinerators. Equally significant are the references in Masuda's story to a “recycling zealot” (risaikuru katsud ni nesshin na j nin), a man in Ginko's building who forages in the trash for the newspapers and magazines that others are illegally attempting to throw away. The man piles these periodicals behind the building's staircase; his stacks are twice set on fire, but as the narrator wryly notes, “For some reason no one complained when shortly over a year later a mountain of old newspapers began piling up in the same place. Even now bundles of comic books and old newspapers were lined up there.”127 The behavior of the residents is consistent. The volume of the recycling zealot's accumulations reveals that the new trash bags have yet to change ingrained habits: people continue to toss away recyclables. Moreover, the residents do not seem to mind that the zealot does not actually recycle, even when his packrat habit threatens the safety of their building. It is the “recycling zealot” whose behavior is

contradictory. On the one hand, he is determined that no periodicals be incinerated with burnables. On the other hand, he does not turn in these materials, which would allow them to be used to produce new products. Instead, he has transformed the space behind the staircase into his own trash disposal site, where recyclables are burned just as they would have been in the city's official incinerators. As in her discussion of the new garbage bags, the narrator does not attempt to balance discourse on a single misguided recycling aficionado, whose extreme behavior is abetted by neighbors too preoccupied to sort their own trash, with discourse on the recycling that takes place in other buildings. The narrator suggests that no one recycles printed matter when in fact this is far from the case. References in “Smoke” to the newly implemented waste disposal policies and residents’ reactions to them reveal some of the contradictions that inhere in efforts to remediate environments, especially how rapidly these attempts can backfire, both in Japan Page 265 →and in sites around the world. At the same time, the narrator's eagerness to minimize successful remediation reveals the biases prompted by her aversion to sanctioned schemes. Whereas “Smoke” downplays the benefit to ecosystems of using new garbage bags, Yu Hynjong's story, written just a decade after the armistice between North and South and the creation of the DMZ, goes to the opposite extreme by downplaying some of the dangers of this space.128 “Demilitarized Zone” narrates the tale of Han Pilgu, a North Korean boy whose father defected to the south and whose mother, as the former wife of a deserter, has been ordered to relocate to Ryanggang Province, a remote and impoverished region on the Chinese border. Rather than accompany his mother, with whom he has a strained relationship, Pilgu runs away. He travels to the DMZ, sneaks inside, and spends the night. The next day he is discovered by South Korean soldiers who treat him kindly and promise they will help him find his father; that night he falls asleep hoping his dreams will be realized. He has a bad premonition the following morning when he discovers that his kitten P’engmi has vanished. Desperate to find the animal that has accompanied him for much of his journey, he hurries back to the barbed-wire fence that runs along the border of the demilitarized zone. Climbing over the fence, he is killed by North Korean soldiers; alarmed by the sound of gunshots, the South Korean troops who had taken care of him venture out only to discover his lifeless body dangling on the barrier's uppermost wire. Men from both sides are crushed at his death, and the story concludes solemnly and straight-forwardly, giving measurements in Korean and “Demilitarized Zone” in misspelled English: “Width 4 km, Length 155 miles. D M Z (Demiliterized Zone), an unmistakable new day had begun above this abandoned land of exile where the funeral bell rang.”129 “Demilitarized Zone” dramatizes the grim toll the Korean War has had on individuals, families, and on Korean society as a whole. Interwoven with this discourse on trauma to people is that on trauma to nonhuman bodies both large (the ecosystems of the DMZ) and small (Pilgu's captured kitten). The damage people inflict on one another is far less ambiguous than what they do to the nonhuman. Pilgu's treatment of P’engmi is a microcosm of human treatment of the DMZ: “Demilitarized Zone” leaves unclear whether this boy is ultimately the animal's liberator or kidnapper. The story describes Pilgu as walking along a mountain road not long after embarking on his journey to the South. He spots a kitten crouching between some rocks and wonders whether it might be waiting for its mother. Not waiting to find out, he grabs the animal after a brief game of hide-and-seek; the feline initially puts up a struggle but soon settles down. Several pages later, the narrator shows Pilgu anthropomorphizing Page 266 →P’engmi, assuming the animal is as delighted to escape from its mother as he is to escape from his own; when Pilgu tells P’engmi that he presupposes that the cat does not want to see its mother and the cat only meows in return, Pilgu imagines he knows exactly what it is thinking. Pilgu transposes his own feelings and desires onto this helpless animal, never stopping to consider that it has its own familial background, its own story, and its own desires. Despite the inauspicious beginning of their relationship and Pilgu's keeping the kitten on a short leash, the two bond quickly; the narrator includes several touching scenes of their time together in the DMZ. But P’engmi, seemingly tired of Pilgu, runs away after they reach the South. Discovering that the cat has escaped, and determined to recapture it, Pilgu hurries back to the border and rashly climbs the fence, where he is killed by North Korean soldiers. It is unclear what happens to P’engmi, but the cat obviously wants something different from what Pilgu has in mind. Pilgu does not appear to have hurt the animal, and if it so desires, P’engmi likely will be able to return home without incident, assuming it does not trigger any mines along the way. But it is also possible that P’engmi, having no wish either to return home or to remain with Pilgu, instead had other hopes. This is not to suggest that Pilgu should have been able to decipher the cat's meows. Yet Yu Hynjong's story highlights

how readily people can presume they know what is best not just for other people but also for animals, and even perceive themselves as rescuing them, when in fact they might be doing quite the opposite. But the narrator does not comment on this puzzle and instead highlights the close bond, at least from Pilgu's point of view, between the boy and his cat and the boy's deep sadness at the cat's departure. The reader must deduce P’engmi's suffering from its behaviors. The text's convincing depictions of Pilgu as victim first of historical circumstance and then of an uncooperative feline threaten to overshadow the fact that Pilgu kidnapped the cat and endangered its life to satisfy his own desire for companionship. “Demilitarized Zone” similarly wavers between people as preservers and destroyers of the ecosystems along the border of North and South Korea. At the time of the story's writing in 1964 the extent of the DMZ's ecological potential was not yet known, but it goes without saying that benefiting endangered nonhuman species was not a consideration in establishing the region. The narrator's subtle downplaying of the harm Pilgu inflicts on his kitten mirrors his attempts to minimize, however shrewdly, the harm Korean armies have inflicted on the ecosystems of the DMZ. He by no means sugarcoats either Pilgu's relationship with his kitten or the human presence in the DMZ, and in fact he paints a relatively ambiguous picture of both. But in emphasizing Page 267 →how P’engmi benefits from Pilgu's care and how some flora and fauna flourish in the DMZ, and by seldom commenting on how P’engmi and other nonhuman beings must be suffering because of human actions, the narrator mocks expectations. The ambiguities in this story regarding how human behaviors change the ecosystems of the DMZ somewhat resemble those in such texts as Rongzi's “Insect World,” examined in the previous chapter. Rongzi's poem and Yu Hynjong's story both bring out the difficulties inherent in assessing degrees of human damage to ecosystems. But there is an important difference between the environmental ambiguity of the two. Rongzi's poem declares that two separate worlds exist—the polluted human world and the unpolluted insect world—only to intimate that the latter has not been unaffected by human behaviors; the principal ecoambiguity of “Insect World” lies in the extent to which people have compromised the grasshopper's supposedly “green world” of plenty. Although highlighting the greater biodiversity of the demilitarized zone compared with other spaces, Yu Hynjong's narrator does not attempt to depict the DMZ as an ecological paradise. He speaks explicitly both of the impressive range and health of nonhuman species in the region and of this space's degradation. The main environmental ambiguity in this story is how to classify the overall military bootprint on the ecosystems of the DMZ. Yu Hynjong's story points out the damage people have done even to Korea's mountains, the most majestic part of its landscape. Early in his journey, Pilgu observes: The screen-like mountains piled up one atop the other, layer upon layer, like a folding screen. To his amazement, he saw that on the barren summit of every mountain there were tunnels, around whose cavernous holes sandbags had been piled like low earthen walls. Soldiers in golden yellow military uniforms were coming in and out. In addition, he observed that traveling along the mountain roads were several oxcarts loaded with something he couldn't discern. Also on the road heading both up and down were open trucks carrying soldiers.130 So while the mountains continue to pile up, one after the other, layer upon layer, like a folding screen (pyngp’ung kat’n sandl i ch’pch’bi kypch’y isstta), their insides have been reshaped by tunnels and their outsides by roads; this folding screen (pyngp’ung), like its smaller wood/cloth/paper counterparts, has been decorated, and punctured, to accommodate human demands. Page 268 → The human presence is less immediately apparent in the demilitarized zone itself, but it is no less significant. To be sure, the narrator initially gives the impression that this is a wondrous nonhuman haven, free not only from living people but also from human traces. Describing Pilgu at the border, he comments: “Inside the barbed wire fence was a luxurious forest. The boy nearly shouted for joy. This was because in the forest on the other side of the barbed wire fence there was a deer that looked as though it had come out of a fine mold, bathed in the glow of

the sun. The deer was standing there absentmindedly, its beautiful smallish body tinged with reddish luster.”131 Pilgu is so excited that he digs his way under the fence. Having crossed into the DMZ he finds its ecosystems somewhat overwhelming: the weeds are so tall they block his view, and the aroma of the grass irritates his nose. “Demilitarized Zone” contrasts nonhuman resilience with the ephemerality of human cultural products. The natural world appears to be thriving and occasionally menacing. The paragraphs that follow Pilgu's entrance into the demilitarized zone underscore its wonders: there are rainbows during the day, glorious sunsets in the evening, and stars at night; the sounds of beautiful pheasants, whistling wild birds, and numerous species of chirping insects create a seductive soundscape; thick weeds growing on former rice fields make travel difficult, but they too indicate that the nonhuman is flourishing. This sentiment is reinforced later in the story, when Pilgu falls asleep surrounded by a grassy field of the greenest green, where a cuckoo cackles, and a pair of deer nuzzle each another while dense forests stand peacefully in the distance. To be sure, after a night in the DMZ, Pilgu discovers that the elm under which he slept in fact is not a thriving tree but is instead the skeleton of one that was tarred and burned long ago. But nearby are acacias with leaves so thick with sap they risk dyeing hands green; soft sunlight and exquisite bird-songs envelop this tree; and milk-white mushrooms grow out of it, damaged or destroyed nonhuman bodies providing homes for other species. In contrast, the piles of scrap iron thirty meters from the tree and the abandoned village some thirty meters beyond are disintegrating, soon to be consumed by tenacious vines. “Demilitarized Zone” draws attention not only to nature's resilience but also to its remarkable ability literally to cover up human tracks: sap soaks not only leaves but also people's hands, sunlight and song embrace the devastated but still standing tree, and mushrooms and other plants envelop its frame, while vines wrap themselves tightly around piles of scrap. Human changes to the DMZ itself are more ambiguous. Almost immediately after Pilgu enters this space the narrator comments that it is a region of great human-induced danger, of which the boy is blithely unaware: “There Page 269 →were land mines buried and concealed everywhere around the circumference of the barbed wire, ready to snatch life away from anyone or anything that stepped on them. But the boy didn't know about this, didn't know that he was walking a tightrope.”132 The astonishment of the South Korean soldiers on learning of Pilgu's uneventful crossing builds on the fact that the mines remain a threat not only on its borders but throughout the DMZ, both to people and to animals large enough to trigger them.133 Yu Hynjong's story contrasts the impressions of a young, somewhat naive boy with the realities of this zone. On the other hand, not only does Pilgu successfully navigate the tightrope, but there also is no sign that he discovered animals killed by land mines. References to buried land mines, reminders of how rapidly lives can be annihilated, are greatly outnumbered by passages on the biotic glories of the DMZ. Noise pollution also appears to be a menace, with loudspeakers from the northern and southern borders of the DMZ battling for dominance throughout the night. Yet the changes they inflict on the environment are not addressed explicitly. The narrator cites the announcements coming one after another from loudspeakers along the DMZ, and he does not depict nonhuman sounds as interrupting or even accompanying those made by people. Unlike the mountains described early in the story as piling up one atop another only to be punctured by human activity, the announcements building up from the DMZ's loudspeakers are not interrupted by nonhuman activity. It is noteworthy that although the pages of “Demilitarized Zone” preceding the lengthy transcript of these announcements contain numerous references to melodious animal songs, these quickly fade once the humangenerated sounds become audible. More significantly, nonhuman voices remain silent even after the narrator's attention turns to Pilgu and the announcements fade from the forefront of the text. That night the voice of a turtledove is heard, but this is the last nonhuman sound mentioned in Yu Hynjong's story. When Pilgu awakens he imagines he hears the voice of his cat, while “Demilitarized Zone” concludes with a reference to a recently rung funeral bell. It is unlikely that the noise pollution from both sides of the DMZ has permanently silenced the region's fauna, but the story suggests that it will continue to make a powerful mark. At the same time, just as he did not speak about or even speculate as to the harm Pilgu likely was inflicting on his kitten, the narrator does not balance his eloquent discussions of thriving foliage with comments on silenced animals. The narrator reveals the existence of nonhuman silence by describing only human-generated sounds, but he does not refer explicitly to this stillness. “Demilitarized Zone” depicts Pilgu as using P’engmi to help assuage his Page 270 →personal conflicts (loneliness

and isolation from his family) and as caring little about the animal's desires or about how his behavior affects its well-being. The story similarly depicts Koreans as using the ecosystems of the demilitarized zone to help mediate interstate conflicts, regardless of what their behaviors do to these spaces. Yu Hynjong's narrator portrays Pilgu's treatment of the cat as merciful, suggesting that the animal was a stray that benefited from the companionship. Human behaviors in and toward the bodyscapes of the DMZ likewise are depicted as merciful; “Demilitarized Zone” asserts that many parts of environments benefit greatly, even profit remarkably, from the changed human presence. With home replaced by a stranger's arms (for the cat P’engmi), and villages, farms, and people supplanted by land mines and the clamor of competing announcements (for the DMZ), the story implies that human behaviors bring about far more nonhuman suffering than is explicitly addressed. The narrator of Masuda's “Smoke” mocks the reader's expectations that new garbage bags will help protect environments, yet she paradoxically presents a distorted picture of their actual advantages. Similarly, Yu Hy njong's “Demilitarized Zone”—an early foreshadowing of the DMZ's potential as an ecological reserve—mocks the reader's expectations that this heavily fortified space is bereft of thriving flora and fauna, yet it ironically presents a shadowy picture of the suffering occurring there. Numerous differences separate Masuda's and Yu Hy njong's stories. But both texts suggest the extent to which conditions that defy expectations can be overemphasized and those that match expectations minimized. At times this downplaying highlights and at other times it undervalues ecodegradation. Yet these stories remind us just how readily assessments of human damage to environments rely on and vary according to what is expected, more than actual physical conditions. Exposing quite different ambiguities about evaluating human destruction of the nonhuman are creative works such as Kim Kwanggyu's “Sawl i karosu” (April's Roadside Trees, 1991) and the Taiwanese writer Bai Qiu's “Shu” (Trees, 1971). The trees in these texts in some ways stand in for humans: both poems use battered trees as metaphors for abused yet resolute, indomitable people. But “Trees” and “April's Roadside Trees” also can and should be read more literally as depictions of anthropogenic environmental degradation. Neither gives any indication as to time (except, in Kim Kwanggyu's poem, for the month of April) or place; these texts could be situated wherever there are trees. As in Yu Hynjong's “Demilitarized Zone,” they depict heavily damaged trees that nevertheless refuse simply to disappear. But in so doing they reveal the uncertainties inherent in determining what people do, not to the existence (shape) of these trees, and by extension other Page 271 →nonhuman bodies, but instead to their essence (identity). These texts are related to those that negotiate ambiguities about the endurance of nonhuman resilience, as examined in the previous chapter. But Kim Kwanggyu's “April's Roadside Trees” and Bai Qiu's “Trees” differ in their emphasis on the survival of nonhuman bodies after death. Understandings of what constitutes a “tree” or for that matter any part of the nonhuman are challenged, with varying ramifications. “April's Roadside Trees” describes trees that continue to stake their claim as trees even as their bodies are gradually being dismembered. Speaking of a stand of trees of indeterminate location and number, the text begins by noting that years ago their crowns were removed to make room for power lines. Next to fall were their limbs. The speaker does not explain why their branches were cut, remarking only that “even when the spring wind blows, they cannot move / only their torso-like trunks remain / and they have difficulty breathing.”134 Come April, the shoots poking out from these trunks are removed, rendering the trees “unable to grow even new leaves / impatiently kicking and screaming / but unable to let forth even a cry.” Yet even so, “April's Roadside Trees” concludes, “leaves sprout from their trunks.” This contradiction, an instance of informational ambiguity, also could be a reversal; fighting to retain their identities, the trees despite everything eventually were able to produce new leaves. After all, felled tree stumps often sprout shoots and leaves even if they have been cut to grade level. It also is possible that the trunks themselves are not sprouting new leaves but instead are providing homes for other plants growing around them, or even within them; the decapitated and dismembered trees now might be seen more as bodies that nourish other bodies rather than as remaining verdant. The poem leaves uncertain the precise condition of the trees but points to their tenacity when decapitated. More significant, and providing an intriguing spin on the Chinese “White Horse” paradox (; baima fei ma, lit. white horse not horse) and “White Horse Discourse” ( ; baima lun)—that complicates, among other things, understandings of fei (; which here can mean both “is not a member of” and “is not identical to”)—are the

questions “April's Roadside Trees” raises about what people do to the trees’ essence or identity and how this essence/identity is understood. The trunks are still recognizable as trees and are identified as such in the poem's title. In the poem itself, these trunks are referred to as “roadside weeping willows” that are explicitly described as unable to weep: “the roadside weeping willows…/ cannot utter so much as a cry” (kilga i suyangbdl / ulmchoch’a t’ttril su ps). Even reduced to silent trunks—with heads, limbs, and branches removed—the trees retain Page 272 →at least one of the characteristics associated with their species. Kim Kwanggyu's poem thus questions what makes a tree a tree and when a tree becomes something other than a tree (firewood, woodchips, sawdust, ashes). It also makes the reader ponder the extent to which such names and identities matter, since in some cases they can distract from the damage species suffer. A tree's retaining its essence as a tree can draw attention away from its disfiguration, whether for power lines or lumber. Highlighting the resilience of the species known as “tree,” Kim Kwanggyu's poem also inspires important questions concerning their fate. The Taiwanese writer Bai Qiu's “Trees” provides an important twist on the dilemma of what happens when a trunk is reduced to a stump and even transformed into ashes.135 This poem, by one of Taiwan's early proponents of experimental verse, features trees that appear to have been dismembered (the trees compare themselves to stakes) claiming that there is nothing people can do to weaken their tenacious hold on the land: We're standing, standing, standing [zhanzhe, zhanzhe, zhanzhe], like stakes [zhuangding] driven in the ground, stubborn and unwavering Oh, heaven, this is our land, our burial vault Even if you saw us, piece by piece and order us about, without restraint This is our land, our burial vault Sentence us to become torches burn to ashes every shouting pore, we’ll still, with stubbornly resistant claws, grab firmly this place where we've established ourselves. This is our land, our burial vault136 A group of standing trees challenges people to do to them what they have done to so many of their predecessors: cut them down, saw them apart, use them as they please, even burn them to soot. The trees assert an intriguing form of resilience. To begin with, they liken themselves to stakes that have been driven into the ground (ru yizhi rutu de zhuangding), suggesting that not only their shapes but even their existence in this space was determined by people; rather than sprouting out of the soil, they might have been forced into it. In other words, their resilience stems at least in part from how people have planted them. Furthermore, they claim that no matter how much people manipulate them, this land is still theirs, and they plan on forever grasping hold of it. Their tops might be carted away, but sufficient traces of root tendrils Page 273 →remain for the land to serve as their “burial vault.” In the third, sixth, and eleventh (and final) lines the trees repeat: “This is our land, our burial vault” (zhei shi women de tudi, women de muxue). The trees might no longer exist as standing trees, trunks, or even stumps, but the residue they leave is enough for them to remain legitimate parts of the landscape. While alive, the trees claim themselves “stubborn and unwavering” (guzhi er budongyao); as ashes and roots, they believe their “stubbornly resistant claws [will still] grasp [the land] firmly” (reng yi wankang de zhao, jinjin de juezhu). Their shape might change dramatically, but their character will remain the same. What makes the narrating trees so convinced this will be the case? They appear only to have been dismembered,

not yet to have been sawed apart, much less burned; they claim they are standing like stakes, not that they already have been reshaped into stakes. It is clear from their discourse that they have witnessed or at least heard about the degradation they describe. The poem does not specify how successful the disfigured and destroyed predecessors of the narrating trees have been at accomplishing what the latter claim they will do when confronted with human abuse. So in many ways the trees’ assertions can be dismissed as nothing more than speculation, or simple bluster. But by blurring boundaries among damage, obliteration, and transformation, these declarations intensify the questions concerning human impacts on trees asked in Kim Kwanggyu's “April's Roadside Trees.” Doubts are raised as to whether trees ever really disappear. Even as the visible parts of their physical bodies are yanked from the land, fragments are left behind, some tangible, some not, including those of human and nonhuman memory. Perhaps then people are incapable of destroying or even fundamentally trans-forming these parts of the nonhuman. Like Kim Kwanggyu's “April's Road-side Trees,” Bai Qiu's “Trees” points to the fine line between celebrating the resilience of nonhuman bodies and facilitating their destruction. Doing so to an extreme are texts such as the Nigerian writer Owiti K’Akumu's “A Green Tree”: I am a tree A green tree Of bloody petals Roost for songbirds Once struck by the evil thunderbolt Crown half-covered with dry leaves Cracking and crackling in the rifle Of the cruel harmattan Page 274 → I am a tree A green tree Cut from the land Left hanging in the air Blown away by wind Withered by tropical sun. I am a tree A green tree Tunis to Accra Boughs extending to Mogadishu Maputo Libreville Luanda

On my trunk Gargantuan! Shaped by severance axe Cape Town the tip. I am a tree Unlogged tree Looking for its roots Black roots This green tree, this person, this (inverted) continent has been attacked from all sides, has been uprooted, yet its branches still reach from Somalia and Mozambique in the east to Gabon and Angola in the west and as far as Cape Town in the south, as it continues to search for its roots in the north. “April's Roadside Trees,” “Trees,” and “A Green Tree” all portray nonhuman beings that maintain their identities as trees even after undergoing radical physical transformations. Although in many ways metaphors for human resilience, they also powerfully reveal the extent to which physical standards, even those imposed by the affected bodies, can complicate assessments of social and environmental degradation. Social and Temporal Standards Even more complex are scenarios, such as the one addressed in the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's “Slp’n twaeji” (Sad Sow, 1993), where harming the nonhuman appears justifiable, even desirable. Whereas Kim Kwanggyu's and Bai Qiu's texts focus on trees suffering from blatant and indefensible human Page 275 →abuse (at least from the nonhuman perspective), Ch’oe Sngho's prose poem exposes the ambiguities of determining justifiability and the extent to which these determinations depend on social standards. “Sad Sow” features a farmer who purposely killed an animal on which he had been relying for revenue. According to the narrator the slaying was “unnecessary” and “foolish,” sentiments seemingly shared by the farmer. But narrating the story behind the murder, “Sad Sow” indicates that the farmer killed an animal in considerable pain; dispatching this animal might have spared it years of suffering. “Sad Sow” is most obviously a fable designed to warn people of the consequences of acting rashly and especially to refrain from biting the hand that feeds. Yet this text also raises important questions about interpreting human treatment of animals. Ch’oe Sngho's prose poem begins with the news that one day a sow, feeding its eight newborn piglets, suddenly bit them to death, “as if it were crazy” (mich’in tsi). At first distraught over this seemingly incomprehensible event, the sow's owner became angry when he thought of all the income he could have earned selling the young pigs. So in a rage he cut their mother's throat. “Sad Sow” notes that although the owner's emotions are understandable, his actions resemble those of a madman; the text comments that people should watch out for this type of insanity (k kwanggi rl chosim haeya handa). But the text then takes an interesting turn, revealing both the reason behind the sow's seemingly irrational murder of its own offspring and sympathy for domestic animals: “It was later discovered that a large, thick nail had become lodged in one of the sow's molars. Because it was a beast that couldn't speak, its anguish and frustration would have been even more extreme.”137 The prose poem empathizes with the sow, assuming that its inability to translate its pain into words intensified its mental and physical agony; the accuracy of this postulation is unclear, but its presence suggests compassion for the pig. “Sad Sow” also notes that villagers have been putting steel objects into the troughs where animals feed, a practice they vow to abandon after learning the fate of their neighbor's pig. Domestic animals are revealed as victims both of their owners and of their own inability to voice their pain. And people are shown to regret their treatment of these creatures; “Sad Sow” concludes, “the farmer embraced the pitiful sow's head and cried sadly. And he cried over his own foolishness, which couldn't be reversed even were he to cut his own throat.”138

The narrator and the pig's owner both seem to believe that killing the animal was an irrational and unjustifiable act. And most readers likely would concur, considering that the pig's owner was not aware that the animal was in pain and there was no sign that it posed a threat to other animals. Anger Page 276 →at the sow for killing her shoats is understandable, but few would argue that this rage justifies murder. “Sad Sow” would have been a far simpler tale had it stopped with the murder of the sow and not disclosed its condition. Deeply complicating matters are the animal's undeniable agony and the uncertainty surrounding the treatability of its wound. Because the text does not specify time or location, saying in the first line that the events narrated happened “one day” (harunn), it is unclear whether the episode occurs in a period or place where the wound could have been treated and the animal's pain managed. So in many ways the owner's act, although questionable in motivation, might have been one of mercy: it could be argued that under the circumstances killing the animal was the kindest action to take. Alluding to but not explicitly examining the multiple complexities of human relationships with farm animals, “Sad Sow” asks what determines the morality of human behavior vis-à-vis the nonhuman. It also queries the extent to which motives, intent (what if the owner had meant only to punish rather than kill the pig), and actual impact (both immediate and long-term) matter. Finally, it asks who determines the answers to these questions and the extent to which these questions can even be answered. As science fiction by the Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi suggests, in addition to questions of morality, motives, intent, and impact, the speed of both damage and recovery plays an important role in determining the significance of harm to environments.139 Hoshi's short-short story “Genzai” (The Present, 1973) speaks of damage that greatly harms generations of human and nonhuman beings. For these particular entities, environmental degradation is noteworthy and considerable. But “The Present,” written in the first heyday of Japanese environmental science fiction, amid the first boom in environmental protection laws, interrogates the significance of this degradation to the landscape when viewed across time. It depicts the earth's soil as cycling from genesis to dumping ground to graveyard of human civilization across several millennia, only to repeat the pattern as though there had been no previous cycles. In so doing, “The Present” suggests that human transformations of environments might ultimately have an insignificant impact on the planet. Covering several thousand years in two pages, during which people move from toiling in the soil to managing their leisurely lives via computer, Hoshi's story clearly engages in generalities and extremes. Yet it encourages the reader to reconsider the temporal perspectives from which judgments on environmental as well as social degradation are made. “The Present” begins with a conversation among unidentified individuals who decide to assemble a time capsule containing “materials revealing the troubles of the present age” (genzai no nayami o shimesu shiry). These Page 277 →problems include wars, pollution (kgai no mondai), discrimination, and the “various kinds of deterioration of environments that accompany urbanization” (toshika ni tomonau samazama na kanky akka).140 Concerned that if they bury the capsule in the ground it will be forgotten, or that the earth's shifting crust will render it irretrievable, they decide to launch it into space. Not unlike buried Buddhist sutras, which are expected to bubble to the surface when Maitreya (the successor of kyamuni Buddha, Buddhism's founder) comes to earth, these capsules have been programmed by the computer to return to earth at a precise moment, several thousand years in the future (ssennen ato ni oite, futatabi, pitari to chiky e modotte kimasu. Konpyt ni yotte, kono keisan o kakunin shimashita).141 The narrator describes how while the capsule wanders through space preserving “‘the present’…just as it is” (“genzai” …o sono mama), conditions on earth are changing. Courtesy of powerful computers, life is becoming implausibly comfortable, which makes people indolent and leads eventually to the collapse of human societies the world over: “People died one after the other. Culture was destroyed; cities lost their functions and were abandoned. Even well-built structures weathered and returned to the soil [tsuchi ni kaette itta].” The few people who survive start from the beginning, working this same earth (daichi) and devoting all their energy simply to staying alive; in time their descendants are able to engage in more intellectual pursuits. The narrator describes civilization as slowly advancing, albeit with numerous false starts, and science eventually flourishes. Not long thereafter the capsule returns to earth. The story concludes: “Filled with curiosity, interest, and expectation, people opened it up and said, ‘This is strange. What's going on? Isn't this the present [genzai sono mono de wa nai ka]?’” By giving the planet but not individual generations repeated chances, Hoshi's story suggests fundamental incentives and disincentives to safeguarding against environmental degradation.142 Imagining human history as an endlessly repeating cycle, Hoshi's story speaks explicitly of the extensive damage

people inflict on one another. Local wars are eventually superseded by global meltdown: “The world moved toward collapse and cataclysm. Tranquility disappeared…Brute strength. This was the only way to live.”143 Soil, the principal nonhuman body featured in “The Present,” is depicted as genesis and graveyard. In between, the soil is the ground people damage with pollution and urbanization, not unlike the waters featured in the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's poem “Below the Water” (1983), analyzed in the following chapter. The fact that the individuals who open the time capsule find that its contents reflect precisely their current conditions (genzai sono mono) shows that ecosystems have come full circle. Whatever damage they currently are experiencing comes from relatively Page 278 →recent human behaviors; destruction of environments in the previous round(s) of human history does not appear to have carried over into the present. Hoshi's story thus points out the arbitrariness of the time frames that can be employed when assessing human changes to and particularly degradation of the nonhuman. Considerable damage can be detected if one looks solely at the differences between “the present” and a moment in the “past.” But once the gaze begins to pan out across large spans of time, injury can become more difficult to ascertain. If an ecosystem is damaged but then seemingly fully repaired, the significance of its injuries varies depending on the time required for remediation. Much more than an exposé and hypothesizing of the cycle(s) of human civilization, Hoshi's “The Present” also problematizes the criteria used to evaluate human changes to bodies both human and nonhuman. Contradictions are at the crux of a diverse array of environmental problems and their assessments. As the clamor for limited resources becomes ever more insistent, the trade-offs that characterize many human interactions with ecosystems, the ambiguities of human responsibility, and the variability of assessing behaviors all are likely to become more pronounced. Analyzing ambiguities like those in the creative works discussed above can provide us with valuable insights into processes of preventing and remediating damaged environments. Negotiating the intertwining conflicts between behaviors and conditions, behaviors and attitudes, and conditions and attitudes, understood broadly, is another hallmark of intercultural conceptual networks of ecological ambiguity. These various entanglements and the fascinating interactions they spotlight are the focus of the second half of Ecoambiguity.

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PART II

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FIVE / Acquiescing The lights [on the river from nearby buildings] were only surface reflections and had no connection with the river itself. Still, reflecting the lights, the river was beautiful. Likewise, the lights reflected on the surface of the river were beautiful. The filth at the bottom of the river was hidden from sight. Ichiko believed all that mattered was that the river appeared beautiful. 1

The narrator of the Japanese writer Masuda Mizuko's short story “Kagami” (Mirror, 1996) here depicts a young woman admiring a polluted river that by day is repulsive but by night is glorious. Reflections of lights from nearby buildings make it possible to dismiss the detritus below the water's surface. By stating explicitly that the lights from nearby buildings have “no connection” with the soiled river (kawa…to wa nan no kankei mo nai), yet depicting these lights as making the river appear beautiful, and in fact repeating the word “beautiful” ( utsukushii) three times in the five sentences cited above, “Mirror” emphasizes the relative ease with which appearances can be distorted; mirrors, including the surface of the water, reveal as much as they conceal. Ichiko also believes that if she were to commit suicide by throwing herself into the river, “it wouldn't matter how filthy the water was” . The filthier the better, in fact, since “there would be no worry of living people swimming in the river, and she could have it all to herself” . Interestingly, Ichiko keeps away from this river when it is raining, because “raindrops churned up the water and the river gave off a bad odor” .2 The visual is more easily dismissed than the olfactory, which is purposely avoided. Masuda's text depicts ecological problems as either overlooked or avoided, Ichiko exhibiting the myopic vision—both literal (the inability or unwillingness to see beneath the surface of the water) Page 282 →and figurative (the failure to think of anything beyond the well-being of the vanishing self)—that often leads individuals to acquiesce to the realities of ecological degradation. Conflicts between people's behaviors and actual environmental conditions are widespread in literature that addresses human damage to ecosystems. Most common are creative works such as “Mirror” that feature individuals acquiescing to environmental distress. The reasons for this phenomenon are varied: some people appear not to notice the injuries inflicted on environments, some are profoundly troubled by changes to ecosystems but think they are powerless to challenge the status quo, and some believe their own safety or financial gain justifies devastating ecosystems and condoning the resulting human and nonhuman suffering. For those who stand to profit significantly from injured environments, or for whom attempting to repair or prevent damage to such ecosystems would prove life-threatening, reconciling oneself to ecodegradation might not signify a disjuncture between conditions and behaviors. But as the writings analyzed in this chapter suggest, acquiescence is part of the problem. However undesirable, environmental degradation all too frequently goes unchallenged; it is frequently accepted, both passively and actively, as a price that must be paid for progress, security, and in many cases human happiness. The creative works discussed below mediate five often deeply interconnected types of acquiescence to environmental damage: being unaware or feigning ignorance of significant ecological transformation; being aware of and even disturbed by environmental harm but resigning oneself to it; recognizing and actively enhancing ecodegradation despite knowing the likely consequences; being aware of environmental damage yet disavowing its presence; and engaging in practices that do nothing to address the imperiled nonhuman and in fact increase human suffering. Whereas Chapter 3 focused on the uncertainty of environmental conditions, this chapter looks at creative texts where circumstances are relatively clear and where the principal contradictions are between people's behaviors and environmental conditions. The analytical distinctions in acquiescence to ecodegradation examined here are finer than ecocritical scholarship generally posits. Together the writings discussed in this chapter illustrate these distinctions by depicting a broad spectrum of conflicts between behaviors and ecological realities in literature that addresses how people harm the natural world.

Myopia and Myopic Hyperopia Many creative texts highlight how readily humans unconsciously or deliberately ignore ecological degradation.

They portray people as unconcerned Page 283 →even with visible damage to environments; people simply look away and pretend not to see threats to nonhuman and often human welfare, or they become blasé about the changes in their landscapes. Desire for instant gratification, hunger for immediate profit, and, as in Masuda's “Mirror,” obsession with surface appearances—in short, the limited perspectives characteristic of myopia—often are shown to lie behind this indifference toward ecological damage. An important subset of texts concerned with the relationship between myopia and environmental degradation reveals myopia as frequently accompanied by hyperopia, in the form of what I call myopic hyperopia. Unlike the term myopia, which refers both to ocular nearsightedness and more generally to a narrow perspective or lack of foresight and discernment, the term hyperopia conventionally refers to only ocular farsightedness. But hyperopia can point also to a fixation on distant vistas, temporal or spatial, at the conscious or unconscious expense of more immediate realities. These distant vistas are not necessarily seen or understood clearly, as with ocular hyperopia, but they are the center of attention. The modifier myopic underlines the frequent short-sightedness of such a fixation. The Japanese writer Tanikawa Shuntar's poem “The Day Small Birds Disappeared from the Skies” (1977) focuses more insistently than Masuda's “Mirror” on the conflicts between conditions and behaviors that characterize myopic hyperopic perspectives. Tanikawa is one of Japan's most esteemed and prolific postwar poets, and one of that nation's most global; not only has he participated in numerous international workshops and projects, his oeuvre has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Nepalese, Hebrew, and most major Western languages. He writes in a variety of styles on a panoply of topics, including environmental degradation.3 “Small Birds,” part of Japan's 1970s boom in conservation literature, has attracted considerable attention worldwide.4 This poem provides an exceptionally strong parody of focusing on the future at the expense of seeing clearly immediate conditions.5 It features people so deeply engaged in increasing infrastructure (building for the future) that they are undaunted by the radical transformations of their society and surrounding ecosystems; they never pause to acknowledge the disappearance of animals from the forests, fish from the oceans, birds from the skies, or even children from the streets and selves (individuality) from human bodies. The repetitive structure of “Small Birds”—the poem is divided into five four-line stanzas, each of which has identical first and third lines and contrasting second and fourth lines—highlights the tenacity and accentuates the absurdity of obsessing about economic development, in other words, of focusing on only one aspect of the future: Page 284 → The day animals disappeared from the woods woods secretly bated their breath The day animals disappeared from the woods people continued building roads The day fish disappeared from the seas seas vacantly swelled and moaned The day fish disappeared from the seas people continued building ports The day children disappeared from the streets streets were even livelier The day children disappeared from the streets

people continued building parks The day individuality disappeared from people people resembled one other The day individuality disappeared from people people continued believing in the future The day small birds disappeared from the skies skies wept quietly The day small birds disappeared from the skies people, without knowing, continued singing6 “Small Birds” is silent on time and place, its environmental cosmopolitanism providing a haunting vision of unacknowledged ecological degradation on a potentially global scale. This poem surrounds its third and fourth stanzas, which address direct losses to human society (children and selves), with three stanzas on nonhuman losses (terrestrial animals, fish, and birds). The scope and degree of these changes is unclear; the text does not identify the location or extent of the devastation and does not specify how many people and nonhuman beings have disappeared. For instance, referring to forests simply as mori, the poem could be speaking of everything from a single grove to all of the world's forests; referring to fish as sakana and birds as tori, it could be pointing to everything from the disappearance of a single fish and bird to the extinction of both species. As in Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain, discussed in the previous chapter, it is also unclear what the poem means by “people” (hito)—all people, large numbers of people, small groups of people, a single person? “People” is written in katakana ( Page 285 → throughout “Small Birds,” a usage that among other things accentuates the separation of human beings from their environments. The repetitive structure of Tanikawa's poem emphasizes the consistency of myopic hyperopic outlooks. Each stanza concludes with the line, “people continued doing X” (hito wa X tsuzuketa), where X is building infrastructure, believing in the future, and singing. The verb “continue” (tsuzukeru) refers explicitly to actions that persist regardless of empirical conditions; echoing as it does throughout the poem, this verb also intensifies the perception of myopia as a repeated phenomenon. Moreover, each stanza's first and third lines read, “The day Y disappeared from X” (X ni Y ga inakunatta hi), X moving from forests to seas, streets, people, and skies, while Y moves from animals to fish, children, individuality, and small birds. The disappearing entities cover much of sentient life, and the locations from which they vanish include most of the earth's surface. Although translated here as “disappeared,” the term inakunatta has a stronger connotation, meaning more literally “ceased to be/exist.” This makes the contrast between the final words of half the poem's lines—“the day” and “disappeared” (inakunatta and hi; )—particularly stark. By confining the phenomena it exposes to a single day “Small Birds” suggests that while myopic hyperopic outlooks are consistent, and widespread, they need not be permanent. On the other hand, by speaking of any number of species as “ceasing to exist,” “Small Birds” implies that even if people no longer build roads, ports, and parks, even if they stop believing and singing, the human and nonhuman losses might be permanent. Interestingly, the things from which other things vanish appear more frequently than the things that disappear. Although not duplicable in the English translation, the first three lines of each stanza begin with the body that remains: forests, seas, streets, people, skies ( [lit. in the woods]… [lit. as for the woods]… [lit. in the woods]…// …/ .7 In contrast, the bodies that disappear are mentioned only in the first and third lines of each stanza. Tanikawa's poem stresses the chasm separating apathetic and even callous human reactions to despoiled ecosystems from the emotive responses of anthropomorphized nonhuman elements/phenomena. Whereas people continue to build roads and ports and keep singing as though there has been no change in the welfare of other species, the forests, seas, and skies mourn their losses by secretly holding their breath (hissori iki o korashita),

vacantly swelling and groaning (utsuro ni uneriumeita), and silently weeping (shizuka ni namida nagashita), respectively. The silence of the natural world is contrasted with the cacophony of the human world. Similarly, while some Page 286 →nonhuman species grieve that other species have disappeared, people appear delighted that children vanish and nonchalant about adults losing their individuality; the day children disappeared the streets became livelier (nao sara nigiyakadatta) and people continued building parks, and the day people lost their individuality they continued believing in the future. Left unclear in “Small Birds” is the extent to which people are conscious of the environmental transformations the text describes. The poem's final line—“people, without knowing, continued singing” (hito wa shirazu ni utaitsuzuketa)—can be read in several ways. It most likely indicates simply that people do not realize that birds have disappeared from the skies. But this line also could be pointing out that individuals are unaware that they are singing, that they are unaware of even their own behaviors. The preceding four stanzas are silent on whether people know what has happened. They might be fully cognizant but for various reasons willfully overlook disappearances, or they could be completely ignorant. If the latter is the case, most disturbing would be not people's failure to react but instead their basic lack of awareness of such extensive damage. More likely than either total oblivion or full consciousness is limited knowledge accompanied by indifference. If travelers confine themselves to roads, they might not be aware that animals have disappeared from the surrounding forests, at least not on the day of this disappearance, since the forests would not yet have had time to alter their appearance. The forests respond to the absence of animals by “quietly bating their breath,” so people likely would pay these landscapes no heed, at least at first. Similarly, if when people go to the ocean they limit themselves to ports, they might not notice that fish have disappeared, at least not right away; the sea's vacant swells and moans might be evident from shore, but visitors would probably not realize what is happening to animal life beneath the surface. Likewise, if people are singing loudly enough, their voices will obscure those of animals, making the absence of the latter difficult to discern. Although many individuals might not detect these changes, it is doubtful that everyone in society is unaware of them. Those who interact regularly with nature—loggers, conservationists, hunters, birdwatchers—could not help noticing. Ordinary people thus likely not only fail to observe environmental damage but also fail to listen to the reports of specialists. Another possibility is that experts who do know have not publicized their findings, constrained by censorship or indolence. The vagueness of “Small Birds” even concerning the numbers of people and animals, much less the geographic area involved, allows this poem to subsume a variety of environmentally cosmopolitan Page 287 →scenarios. Some are more extreme than others, but all point to a pattern of nonchalance vis-à-vis destruction of the nonhuman, one that Tanikawa's poem suggests already is widespread and risks becoming endemic. “Small Birds” emphasizes how people's indifference to environmental change allows them to pursue ever greater human comforts. Their myopic hyperopia shows in their commitment to a future with increased material infrastructure and their refusal to consider what these projects have done to both themselves and their increasingly disappearing offspring. To be sure, “Small Birds” does not specify whether people consider changing what they are doing but ultimately reject these thoughts and continue on as before, or whether it never occurs to them to alter behaviors. But the poem suggests the latter. A more specific instance of myopic hyperopia is the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's “Mul wi e mul arae” (Below the Water That's above the Water, 1983). Whereas in Tanikawa's verse people construct roads, ports, and parks while singing and looking cheerfully to a joyous future, those in Ch’oe Sngho's poem, a group of tourists en route to a recreation park, are intoxicated by the hotels and mountains that surround the heavily polluted lake across which they are traveling. This poem describes ecological degradation near at hand as being ignored, deliberately or unconsciously, in favor of distant landscapes. Written in the early years of Korean environmentalism, “Below the Water” adopts an ecologically cosmopolitan approach, featuring a scenario that could occur anywhere there are lakes, mountains, and hotels. The lake the poem describes could be a single lake or stand in for the earth's many bodies of water: While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake

divers descend to the bottom of the lake to recover a corpse, and at the bottom a colossal tomb of garbage with a fat belly that's growing silently, steadily, bigger, inside the muddy water filled with silt in which are kneaded discarded fetuses and larvae and some cats and dogs, the belly of the colossal tomb of garbage that's getting fatter because it ate a shoe, broken plastic containers, pieces of vinyl, etc., a tomb that with time swells to a corpse-like body, they see, small, melancholy pond snails, their intestines rotting, poisoned by poison in the wastewater, Page 288 → evidence of civilizations born on the waterfront festering together with all kinds of untreated excrement coming out the rear hole. While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake headed toward a recreation park drunk on the view of the hotels and mountains surrounding the lake.8 Mountains rising above the shores of the lake mesmerize, at least from afar, while those growing below the water's surface are ignored, except by the divers. “Below the Water” vividly exposes human abuse of environments: people have transformed a lake into their dumpster, injecting it with solid and liquid waste. Ch’oe Sngho's poem draws attention to the increasing heft of the rubbish mound, equating it first with a “colossal tomb” (mch’ngnan mudm) that has a “fat belly that's growing silently, steadily, bigger” (sori psi chmjm pulnann / paettaegiga ttungttunghaejin ssregidl i mch’ ngnan mudm), then with a “colossal tomb” with a “belly…that's getting fatter” (paettaegiga / ttungttunghaejin ssregidl i mch’ongnan mudm), and then with “a tomb that with time swells to a corpse-like body” (kalsurok sich’e ch’rm m mjip i plnann mudm). The pregnant burial mound does not give birth, instead transforming itself into a corpse-like body (sich’e ch’rm mmjip); read metaphorically, these lines imply that “life” dies before it has a chance to live. Significant as well is the absence of such qualifiers as ch’rm (like) before paettaegi (belly) and mudm (tomb); the body of the tomb might be “like” a corpse, but the pile of garbage creates both an (actual) abdomen and a tomb, redefining these objects. Not surprisingly, this inflating tomb disrupts the lake's ecosystems, and nonhuman beings begin to disintegrate. While the tomb's abdomen continues to swell, the insides of marine animals decompose; the text speaks of “small, melancholy pond snails, their intestines rotting, / poisoned by poison in the wastewater.” These diminutive snails are utterly overwhelmed by the lake's contaminated waters. “Below the Water” refers as well to discarded cats and dogs, indicating that human abuse of the nonhuman spreads beyond the lake's shores. Significant too is how Ch’oe Sungho's text intertwines human abuse of nature with people's abuse of one another; “Below the Water” is one of

many texts addressing human-induced damage to environments that feature people disappearing in polluted bodies of water.9 It is unclear how the human body of the early lines of the poem became a corpse, much less one on Page 289 →the bottom of a lake that divers have been sent to retrieve. While the burial mound swells into a “corpse-like body,” the divers are searching for a human corpse. Is this a case of murder, or suicide? Is it the result of an accident? After several weeks, most corpses float if not weighted, suggesting either foul play or that the dead body has not been dead for long. The reference near the end to festering civilizations is far less subtle: human cultures, like lakes, are rotting away because of people's behaviors. People risk drowning themselves and their environments in human waste. Ch’oe S ngho's poem does not merely liken the ends of sewers to anuses; instead it explicitly labels them as such, albeit with the euphemism twikkumng (lit. rear hole); industrial waste is not said to resemble excrement, it is excrement (paeslmul). These metaphors establish human bodies as at once polluter and polluted. “Below the Water” depicts the risk of total submersion in actual and metaphorical excrement as increasing rapidly: the burial mound is said to swell from a growing belly into an expanding cadaver faster than a boat can cross the lake. It appears to be only a matter of time before the top of the mound breaches the surface and creates a mountain similar in shape but very different in consistency from those surrounding this body of water.10 Contributing significantly to this risk is the disjuncture between conditions (considerable ecodegradation) and behavior (failure to acknowledge this degradation). Even more noteworthy than the poem's descriptions of tangible garbage is its exposé of myopic hyperopia. Although not reflected in the English translation, the first and final lines of “Below the Water” are identical: “While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake” (kwanggwanggaekdl i chanchanhan hosu rl knngal ttae). The following lines (the second stanza) depict a scene that is anything but peaceful; the adjective “tranquil” (chanchan) describes solely the surface of the lake, if that. While tourists cross this allegedly calm surface, divers go to the bottom of the lake to recover a corpse, and there they find a literal tomb of garbage. The vast majority of “Below the Water” describes the horrors seen by the divers. Before its third and final stanza, Ch’oe Sngho's poem seems primarily to expose the hidden abuses of a body of water; the text suggests that despite the nearly bursting garbage hills growing out of the lake's bottom, the surface remains for the most part unaffected. This changes in the text's concluding stanza. Here we learn what the tourists observe and how they observe it; they are transfixed by the human constructions and nonhuman peaks that line the shores of the lake: “[The tourists were] drunk on the view of the hotels and mountains surrounding the lake” (hosu rl tullssan hot’el kwa sandl i ky nggwan e / ch’wihamyns). And we also are informed that they are headed to a recreation park (yuwnji). Page 290 →They are so transfixed with faraway scenery and likely so preoccupied with going in a particular (horizontal) direction— the poem stating that they are “headed toward” (hyanghada, lit. facing), rather than “going to” a recreation park—that they do not notice the (vertical) detritus overtaking the lake much less recognize its menace to their own health, let alone to ecosystems more generally. “Below the Water” suggests that these and similar failures are intricately connected with intensified degradation of environments. People are so preoccupied with distant bodies, bodies whose degradation is not visible because of their distance, that damage closer at hand goes unnoticed until a real crisis erupts. Considering the extent to which the lake's ecosystems have been damaged, it is doubtful that the land on which the hotels are built has been spared; garbage likely has washed up on the shores outside the hotels, but too much space separates the boat and the hotels for it to be visible to the tourists. And the hotels themselves, part of the “civilizations born on the waterfront” (mulga e palsanghaettn munmyng) likely pollute the lake with their own “untreated excrement.” This too would be difficult to detect, although not necessarily infer, from the deck of a boat sailing in the middle of the lake. One of the great ironies of Ch’oe Sngho's poem is that the tourists are preoccupied not simply with human constructions but also with geophysical bodies. Unlike the divers who simply “see” (ponda) what lies beneath the surface of the water, they are quite literally drunk on nature (ch’wihada). “Below the Water” shows appreciating the nonhuman as having little to do with protecting it; the text reveals how focus on far away spaces at the expense of those nearby can even enable destruction of the natural world. To be sure, the poem does not indicate whether the tourists are unaware of how polluted the lake has become or whether

they know about this damage but have chosen to gaze at more distant landscapes. The tourists might be so accustomed to pollution that they see nothing unusual here; particularly if they are from the “civilizations born on [this or other] waterfront[s],” the trip across the lake might be an opportunity to look at something other than fouled aqua.11 Or the tourists might know very little about environmental degradation and never suspect that great damage has been done to the lake beneath their boat. The poem also does not clarify whether it would be possible to tell the lake's condition from the boat deck or whether only divers can see the mountains of waste piling up on the bottom of the lake. But these ambiguities are precisely the point. For the tourists not to have heard or read about the filth would be significant in itself. Such a scenario suggests that those in the know covered up or at least failed to publicize their knowledge, perhaps succumbing to political or corporate pressures or to simple lethargy. Page 291 →If information on the damaged ecosystems was widely available, the tourists’ ignorance might indicate indifference to the landscapes they traverse. Tourists can hardly be expected to research the ecology of every place they visit; and mountain views are almost certain to capture attention. Yet the contrast, the irony of “Below the Water” is so stinging—mounds of garbage bloat like cadavers while people float nonchalantly overhead toward a recreation park—as to compel greater ecological consciousness, or at the very least to begin to stir individuals from their comfort zones. Environmental discourse often assails myopia for its excessive concern with the proximate, for its failure to consider long-term consequences of choices. Myopic behavior drives much ecological degradation. Damage to environments, especially their nonhuman components, is well nigh inevitable as long as concerns of the moment outweigh those of the future, as long as demands of the self and immediate social group overshadow those of others, and as long as regard for human welfare prevails over the health of other species. But by portraying divers with myopic vision as seeing a mountain of garbage and tourists with myopic hyperopic vision as drunk on actual mountains, the poem surprisingly stresses the value of myopia, in the sense of attention to conditions close at hand. Myopia is not depicted as a panacea; the divers appear as blind to the landscapes surrounding the lake as the tourists are to the ecosystems of the lake itself, even its surface. Moreover, the divers are merely described as “seeing” the pile of garbage, not as reacting to it in any way, except to recover a corpse. Yet in even the most extreme environments, including spaces devastated by nuclear attacks, (ocular) myopic perspectives can be just as valuable as their (ocular) hyperopic counterparts.12

Accepting Environmental Degradation Although rarely welcome, environmental problems are often accepted. Whereas Tanikawa Shuntar's “The Day Small Birds Disappeared from the Skies” and Ch’oe Sngho's “Below the Water That's above the Water” feature individuals who are unaware of ecological transformations or at least feign ignorance of them, other creative texts addressing how people damage landscapes portray individuals who are conscious of, even disturbed by environmental degradation but do not actively struggle against it. In some cases the reasons for this discrepancy are unclear. But often the inconsistencies between human behaviors and incontrovertible physical conditions derive from emotions that paralyze the individual. This phenomenon is most Page 292 →readily apparent in early twentieth-century American literature that features protagonists—including Willa Cather's Jim Burden (My Ántonia, 1918), William Faulkner's Isaac (Ike) McCaslin (Go Down, Moses, 1942), F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby, 1925), and Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams (The Nick Adams Stories, 1972)—who grieve over the destruction of the American wilderness but do not confront their own complicity in this degradation.13 Instead, as Louise H. Westling notes, “they all participate in a cultural habit of gendering the landscape as female and then excusing their mistreatment of it by retreating into a nostalgia that erases their real motives, displaces responsibility, and takes refuge in attitudes of self-pitying adoration.”14 While these texts depict gendering environments as allowing individuals to justify abuse, others, including twentieth-century East Asian literatures, implicate a variety of additional factors. These include sorrow over a personal loss that denies an individual broader perspectives; a false sense of security, including the perception that physical distance from polluted sites negates the need for vigilance; and most frequently a sense of helplessness—the damage is too acute or too remote, and political and social systems are too inflexible to allow for prevention and remediation.15 Literary works such as the Chinese writer Chen Jingrong's “Dushi huang-hun jijing” (City Scene at Dusk, 1946)—a powerful evocation of (post)semi-colonial Shanghai's treacherous soundscapes—suggest that even the

most obvious and harmful environmental disruption can be accepted or taken for granted by those living within it. Similarly, this poem's reliance on dispassionate albeit powerful description to expose damage suggests that the poem's speaker has become resigned to conditions, believing them impossible to change. Chen Jingrong wrote poems on numerous topics, including deteriorating human and nonhuman environments.16 “City Scene at Dusk” is one of her early texts on noise pollution, a common theme in her 1980s poetry; it also predates Chinese environmental literature by several decades: The noises of the city have drowned dusk. Like tides The fire engine and the fire brigade With their shrieking bronze bells Passed in frenzied speed. Then came the radio's Teasing girlish voice Teasing and tearing the city's nerves apart… The high officials of the government, the compradors of foreign firms, Page 293 → And cars in a long row like a snake Are eating up the heart of the metropolis… The chime of the bell of the customs office by the river Low and lonely Lands like a tiny needle On the tides of the city noises.17 —Shanghai, September 11, 1946 “City Scene at Dusk” is situated in semicolonial Shanghai, most likely early in the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45).18 By 1930, the city had become the world's fifth largest and an international legend, the so-called “Paris of Asia,” “Paris of the East,” and “New York of the East.”19 It was, in the words of Leo Ou-fan Lee, “a cultural matrix of Chinese modernity…a world of splendid modernity set apart from the still tradition-bound countryside that was China.” As depicted in Mao Dun's celebrated novel Ziye (Midnight, 1930) and other creative writing from this period, Shanghai was a world of cars, radios, and electric lights, as well as publishing houses, hotels, department stores, coffeehouses, dancing, Turkish baths, and film stars.20 But Western modernity had entered the city through its concessions, urban districts reserved for foreigners by treaty. Chen Jingrong's poem speaks of the “customs office by the river,” likely the Customs House, located on the Bund. One of the most pompous edifices in Shanghai, the Customs House since its construction in 1927 was a bastion of British colonial power. Indeed, as China's treaty port par excellence, Shanghai was also a “constant reminder of a history of national humiliation.” Shanghai's star began to fall in the early 1930s, accelerated by Japanese attacks on the city beginning in 1932, followed by Japanese occupation during World War Two; by 1945 the city's urban glory had come to an end.21 To be sure, by 1943 the unequal treaties with Western powers had for the most part been

eradicated, but leftist writers perceived the city as “a bastion of evil, of wanton debauchery and rampant imperialism marked by foreign extraterritoriality, and a city of shame for all native patriots.”22 Shanghai in many ways was such a stronghold, but Chen Jingrong's “City Scene at Dusk” highlights another often overlooked downside of the city's modernity: severe noise pollution. The poem lyrically describes waves of vehicular sounds and human voices, especially those that have been mechanically and electronically augmented, as now comprising the city's principal tides, tides that are so deafening as to have “drowned dusk.” They have overwhelmed not only other sounds, both human and nonhuman, but also entire portions of the day, as well as geophysical phenomena (ocean/river Page 294 →tides). These surging noises tease and tear the city's nerves. At the same time, people and their cultural products—high-ranking government officials, intermediaries of foreign firms, and cars lined up in long rows—devour the heart of the metropolis. With heart and nerves compromised, the city risks collapse, physically and psychologically. Even so, there is no evident public outcry or even feeble protest against current conditions, which instead seem to be accepted by the people of the city. The only human voices are those of a girlish announcer on the radio (a woman or emasculated man) urging people to buy the evening paper, a young woman riding a jeep ridiculously declaring that the moon is larger over China than over other countries, and unidentified voices advertising the arrival of inexpensive American fashion. Frivolous discourse dominates this compromised space, while dissenting voices are nowhere to be heard. Perhaps the latter have been rendered inaudible, overwhelmed by the city's other sounds, but more likely these voices, if they ever existed, have disappeared. “City Scene at Dusk” suggests that Shanghai is populated by individuals who seldom think for themselves, the noise perhaps too overwhelming for them to do otherwise. Apparently one of the few times the city's residents protest conditions is when they reject the fashionable “glass windows, glass commodities” just arrived from the United States that are being advertised at bargain rates. The poem criticizes these individuals—“What! You shake your head at such offers? / You yokel!” Yet perhaps they are being eminently practical: glass windows and other consumer goods, no matter how fashionable, will only shatter in such a soundscape. But except for turning down glass objects, the people of Shanghai appear to accept the status of their city, the changes brought about by Westernization and war. Just as noteworthy is the poem's own response to these circumstances. To be sure, its stark portrayals of this city submerged in clamor can be read as an attempt to jolt people out of their passivity. Yet the text does not actively deplore the transformations it describes, despite its openness about pollution's devastating effects on Shanghai, its residents, and the nonhuman world.23 Also worth noting is the poem's implicit environmental cosmopolitanism, at least in retrospect. “City Scene at Dusk” is situated in Shanghai, but the conditions described are not unlike those of most urban spaces, at least those located near the water; the city is gradually becoming engulfed by noise, and even threatens to become nothing but clamor: the final stanza depicts distinct sounds such as the chime of the customs bell themselves no more than tiny needles “on the tides of the city noises.” These minute pricks can hardly penetrate the noises that engulf the city. Written nearly two decades later, as Taiwan was industrializing rapidly Page 295 →and thoroughly exploiting environments, the Taiwanese writer Rongzi's (Wang Rongzhi) “Women de cheng bu zai fei hua” (Flowers No Longer Flutter in Our City, 1965) likewise depicts urban environmental degradation that continues relatively unchallenged by the people living within it. Rather than designating a specific site, the poem speaks only of “our city” (women de cheng); this most likely is a city in Taiwan, but the poem could be located in most any of the world's urban centers. Featuring an individual who observes from afar, “Flowers No Longer Flutter” exposes resignation to damaged environments more clearly than “City Scene at Dusk.” Ecological injury is criticized yet not actively resisted by the first-person speaker: Flowers no longer flutter in our city in March Crouching everywhere, those colossal beasts of buildings – – – Sphinxes in the desert spy on you with mocking eyes

And packs of urban tigers roar From morning until dusk From morning until dusk Rain of soot thunder of urban noise Discord among gears Jostling among machines Time broken into fragments life increasingly fades…… Night falls, our city like a large poisonous spider Spreads its flashing, rippling, seductive net [zhangkai ta shanyang de youhuo de wangzi] Trapping the steps of pedestrians Trapping the loneliness of hearts The void of the night I often sit quietly on the dreamless night field And watch the city at the bottom of the night like a gigantic diamond brooch Displayed in the glass showcase of the commission house Waiting for a high price.24 “Flowers No Longer Flutter” draws a vivid portrait of an evening urban landscape even more inhospitable than what Chen Jingrong depicts. People not only are assaulted during the day by a deafening soundscape and filthy deluge, by night they are trapped in a web of lights, the tides portrayed in Page 296 →“City Scene at Dusk” having sprouted intertwining tentacles. People are likewise ensnared by the city's buildings, which surround them wherever they go. While the modern in Chen Jingrong's poem tears apart the city's nerves, here the city is suffocated by its own modernity. Nature survives largely in metaphor and simile in this space where flowers no longer flutter: buildings have taken the place of beasts and even images of beasts, vehicles have replaced tigers, and spider webs have been swapped for undulating lights.25 More noteworthy even than the damage to this space is the reaction of the poem's speaker to it. Whereas in “City Scene at Dusk” the speaker does not reveal her positionality, her counterpart in “Flowers No Longer Flutter” describes herself as “often [sitting] quietly on the dreamless night field / And [watching] the city at the bottom of the night.” Here she discloses not only her distance from the metropolis but also how often she simply sits and looks at it. Although fully conscious of the dangers of the city and the high price its construction has exacted from people and the natural world, she does nothing but watch and talk about the degradation of this urban space. Discussing damage is not an insignificant act; discourse on damaged environments is vital in increasing awareness of compromised spaces. Even so, the speaker seems to acquiesce: as the city waits for a high bidder, she too simply waits, perhaps for someone to appreciate her true value; the “loneliness of hearts” (xin de jimo) that in the third stanza characterizes the lives of city people could be something she also is experiencing. Chen Jingrong's “City Scene at Dusk” and Rongzi's “Flowers No Longer Flutter” depict individuals who are relatively passive vis-à-vis urban environmental degradation. The Korean writer Ko n's poem “Yngil man–1” (Y ngil Bay–1, 1991) portrays a similar reaction to the destruction of a body of water, although here comfort is found in establishing common origins. The poem's speaker declares himself so despondent over the loss of his mother

(the bay of the poem's title) to industrial pollution that he declares himself bereft of dreams and any hope of averting apocalypse. In the poem's first two stanzas he indicates that some thirty years ago Yngil Bay—located north of Ulsan/Onsan on Korea's western coast and heavily polluted in the 1980s and 1990s—had been “like a mother to me” (na i mni kat’atta) or “like my friend's mother” (nae ch’ingu i mni kat’atta), and that twenty years ago “it was my mother” (na i mni ytta), someone on whom he could call when needed. These images of nature as mother, or at least comforter, echo those in much classical East Asian literature. Circumstances change in the third stanza, where the poem's speaker reveals that factories have robbed him of his mother (the bay) and that he suffers considerably as a result: Page 297 → But now factories have killed my mother Here sun and moon there is no mother to welcome you Because I have no mother No matter how long I sleep, I have no dreams For millennia now, sand has been telling us about the end of the world Who has understood? Those grains of sand were the mother of every person and beast.26 Ko n's “Yng-il Bay” reconfigures the first line of Blake's poem “Auguries of Innocence”—“To see the world in a grain of sand”—to blur more completely traditional hierarchicalizing categories.27 In the Korean poem sand (morae) is depicted not as containing entire worlds but instead as prophesying the world's end (sesang i kkt’l allry chutta). But echoing Genesis 3:19—“from the ground you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return”—the poem also depicts sand as participating in beginnings. Declaring grains of sand (moraedl [plural]) “the mother [mni (singular)] of every person and beast” (k moraedl i modn saram kwa chimsngdl i mni yttn ksl), the poem stresses both the humbleness of human origins and the shared ancestry of people and animals, if not other nonhuman beings. On the other hand, moving his own beginnings from the bay killed by factories (kongjang n mni rl chuky prytta) to the tenacious sands, the speaker diverts attention away from polluted spaces; by the end of the poem these spaces not only have been replaced (as mother) but also appear to have been forgotten. Ko n's “Yngil Bay” depicts an individual lamenting environmental destruction yet like the speaker of Rongzi's “Flowers No Longer Flutter” finding solace in less compromised spaces. Other creative works feature acquiescence to ecological degradation that takes the form of being aware of and even decrying the destruction of distant sites but being blinded to the threats to more immediate ecosystems. These texts feature individuals who, lulled into a false sense of security, fail to seek remediation of existing damage, whether sweeping yet distant or minor yet proximate. They also do not call for safeguarding areas that to date have remained relatively unaffected. An excellent example is the Chinese writer Han Shaogong's “Nü nü nü” Page 298 →(Woman, Woman, Woman, 1986), an important part of China's 1980s environmental fiction, which tells the story of Aunt Yao, a once vibrant woman who has been physically and mentally incapacitated by a stroke. Most of “Woman, Woman,

Woman”—like much of Han Shaogong's oeuvre—focuses on relationships among people, particularly life in a mountain village and the difficulties Aunt Yao and her family confront because of her illness.28 But “Woman, Woman, Woman” also includes several illuminating passages on human changes to the region and local responses to these changes. Throughout, people acquiesce to and even participate in raiding timber from nearby forests, as well as building roads and bridges across land and waterways that once carried primarily animal traffic. Earlier changes appear to have had minimal impact on ecosystems, at least when viewed across time: An ancient, bluish-green river flowed through a slice of fertile mountain land, ancient pebbles of every color in its bed. They say that in earlier days the river was flanked by thick, dark forests…Later, although no one knows when, local authorities sent people to chop down trees along the river, and only then was there a cautious, evasive, government-financed road [jinshen duoshan de guandao], and only then were there cars and horses passing through. Later, and again no one knows when, the local authorities sent people to build a glorious border wall…By now, of course, this little great wall [xiaochangcheng] had fallen apart, [its pieces barely visible].29 The thick forests that once graced riverbanks were compromised, but they later recovered. Nor is there any indication that the road, intriguingly described as “cautious, evasive, [and] government-financed” has noticeably disturbed either people or animals. And the wall, like so many ruins described in literature, is barely visible; its stones are enveloped in lichen and buried from view by tall, thorny grass. The remains of this structure “crouch and hide quietly, harboring ulterior motives,” but this is the extent of their effect on the landscape. Likewise, the narrator associates the mounds of earth that once supported bricks with toothless gums, asking, “What had they eaten to make their teeth fall out?”30 The depressions bricks made in the ground have yet to be filled, but this will doubtless occur eventually. As time passes, however, the price of acquiescence rises. The following passage, appearing midway through “Woman, Woman, Woman,” is emblematic of how many literatures express submission to anthropogenic harm to ecosystems: Page 299 → As one walked along what was left of the embankment, one could hear the clang of stones being mined and a bridge being built. Before long a brawny and tenacious highway probably would extend into these mountains. One could hear the thuds of trees being felled and bound. The mountain people were preparing to send golden cypress and camphor out of the mountains as boards [to be sold downstream]…Here, “city” is a vague and remote concept. Breathing the emerald green air one wonders: Why do people want to leave the mountains and rivers for cities, where they are crowded and jostled? Could the city be nothing more than a pile of feces pooped from the sun's golden, shining anus, then roasted in the sun and becoming a hard shell—Is that all it is?31 The environmental degradation of this site is impossible to miss: the soundscape is punctuated by the reverberations of stones being unearthed, bridges being built, and trees crashing to the ground. It likewise is easy to find golden cypress and camphor being prepared for downstream markets. The narrator is horrified and disgusted by these behaviors, asking rhetorically whether the city is anything more than a pile of feces excreted by the sun: But this metaphor, as shocking as it is, essentially frees people from responsibility for creating, much less remediating toxic (built) environments. Unlike Ch’oe Sngho's poem “Below the Water,” which likens sewers to rectums excreting human waste, here excrement simply falls from a distant star. As the narrator remarks, in rural areas, the concept of “city” is fuzzy (mohu) and remote (yaoyuan); there is little sense of immediacy, of the need to do anything more than question why people would want to leave the country-side. Such colorful yet ultimately detached responses to past, present, and future transformations of ecosystems can be attributed partly to desires for the riches to be reaped from increased commerce and infrastructure. People also can remain indifferent because ecosystems are able to withstand considerable damage before noticeably collapsing. The paragraphs after the narrator refers to quarrying stone, building bridges, and felling trees offer a glorious vista

of a river winding its way through mountains, a panorama where the only visible human presence is that of a boat on the water. Human and nonhuman are in graceful harmony, the mountains like portals that open and close as the river moves people along: “They call these the Mountain Gates. When the boat arrived, the gates opened; when the boat left, the gates Page 300 →closed.”32 The water is clear, so whatever pollution exists is still undetectable. Even so, the narrator's apathy about what might happen to these ecosystems is noteworthy, since he indicates he knows what can become of even the most pristine spaces when commandeered by infrastructure and large numbers of people. He does not seem to understand that as highways and bridges link this mountainous area ever more closely with urban spaces, the local economy will improve but the region also will likely begin mimicking cities in undesired ways. In certain respects it already has: the narrator describes some of the riverside rocks as “making people associate them with charcoal.” Then he fancifully imagines a fire ignited by ancient gods that “had already burned the peaks and smashed them to pieces, scorched them, transformed them into the black lumps of charcoal piled up on the sands along the river.”33 Interesting here is the narrator's move from describing the rocks as making people think of charcoal to suggesting that they already have been transformed into charcoal. The story indulges in informational ambiguity, blurring lines between association and actuality. What the narrator sees is probably not charcoal, but the story leaves unclear how much time remains before conditions are reversed, before the rocks no longer remind people of charcoal but the charcoal on the riverbank makes them think of rocks. Perhaps this conversion will not happen for many years. But the narrator's disregard of ecological transformations bodes poorly for both human and nonhuman health. Located far from the blighted city, he fails to appreciate just how rapidly the urban plight is likely to become his own. Han Shaogong's “Woman, Woman, Woman” critiques the blindness to their own probable fate of those physically and psychologically separated from damaged environments. Some texts—including the Korean writers Yi Hynggi's poem “Eksrei sajin” (X-ray Picture, 1985), Chng Hy njong's poem “Munmyng i sasin” (Death God Page 301 →of Civilization, 1991), and especially Cho Sehi's short story “Kigye tosi” (City of Machines, 1977)—feature perceptions of powerlessness and feelings of helplessness as also playing a large role in fostering resignation. Severity of decay is compounded by distance in “X-ray Picture,” which describes an individual looking at an image of a nearly ruined landscape, rather than at the landscape itself; he does not specify just how far he is from this terrain physically and temporally and whether this distance is involuntary or self-imposed, but he suggests that in either case collapse is inevitable. In “Death God of Civilization” helplessness vis-à-vis ecodegradation stems from a conviction that people have lost their minds, while in “City of Machines” it derives from a belief that the oppressive social system responsible for environmental harm is immutable. “X-ray Picture” and “Death God of Civilization” are implicitly ecocosmopolitan: like Rongzi's “Flowers No Longer Flutter,” they focus on the degradation of a single, yet unidentified city, while “City of Machines” is more rooted in the circumstances of a particular nation (Korea). Yi Hynggi's “X-ray Picture” uses graphic imagery to highlight the disintegration of an unnamed city. This poem, by a writer known in part for his bleak depictions of human and nonhuman life, is a classic expression of simultaneous awareness and acceptance of ecological disaster:34 This picture of a ruined landscape has a breathtaking angle. Between the haggard ribs of skeleton skyscrapers it shows the city that, having died, has become a lead ingot. That scenery a flock of crows

gathered across the overcast sky are gouging and eating something. The human heart, it's a lie that blood flowing in the heart is red. Bursting black, inky water, and the ruins are muddy. Tomorrow they will collapse. Once more, tomorrow, the ruins will become swamp. The enigmatic beaming X-ray in this way, it testifies only to the truth.35 “X-ray Picture” translates into words a picture that, however enigmatic (susukkekki), “testifies only to the truth” (ojik sasilman l chngmynghanda). This painful truth is that of a devastated city near total collapse. Skyscrapers resemble skeletons, their ribs soaring high above the streets. It is unclear whether these buildings were under construction when the city was reduced to ruins, with meat being added to their bones, or whether they were already completed structures that had their flesh stripped away as the city declined. The poem suggests that people, gouged by crows, are also being reduced to skeletons. Damage to the nonhuman is not engaged with as explicitly as that to people, but it appears substantial. Crows seem to be thriving, yet the claim that the city not only has died but also has turned into “lead ingots” Page 302 →(napttngi) points to significant environmental pollution. Moreover, the “black, inky water” (kmn mngmul) of the thirteenth line likely is not only the fluid that gushes from contaminated human hearts as they are pecked by hungry birds but also the poisoned liquid that inundates and destabilizes the ground on which the city is built. “X-ray Picture” declares that tomorrow everything will disintegrate into swamp; those people and structures still standing will sink into the inky leadstudded waters, creating a marshy environment with an ever larger human footprint. The poem's final line celebrates the X-ray's uncompromising disclosure of the “truth” (sasil): its detailed picture provides not only a privileged view of a city but also foreknowledge of its final days. Although impressive, this vision is of questionable value: in general, the more imminent an event, the greater its inevitability. The picture suggests that nothing can be done to forestall or prevent what is about to transpire. Moreover, the speaker's temporal and physical distance from the city in the photograph is unclear. He could be looking at a picture of his own city or a picture of an unfamiliar metropolis half a world away. The speaker asserts that the buildings in the photograph will fall to pieces “tomorrow” (naeil) and that the day after tomorrow (tasi naeil) all will become a swamp, but “tomorrow” on which calendar? “Tomorrow” could be the day after he sees the picture, or the day after the picture was taken, or some unspecified point in the future. Even so, the speaker's apparent acquiescence to the city's ruin is noteworthy. He simply describes what the X-ray reveals about this place. At no point does he offer an opinion on what should have been done to prevent conditions from deteriorating to such a degree, let alone what could be done to forestall their recurrence elsewhere. Perhaps he believes that so doing would be pointless, that the information has arrived too late and that nothing can be done in the short time remaining. But the poem does not lament even this lack of opportunity. Similar to many creative works dealing with damaged ecosystems, “X-ray Picture” paints a grim portrait of environments allowed to decline to the point of no return. The poem suggests that this situation stems from their being regarded not only with sorrow and frustration but also with complacency. “Truths” of environments are known, and tolerated. Written several years later, Chng Hynjong's poem “Death God of Civilization” describes a deafening yet nearly

lifeless unnamed city drowning not in a swamp but in infrastructure; this is a city “blanketed in the black asphalt / of development headed toward death.”36 “Death God” also exhibits frustration and despair with current conditions. By including several rhetorical questions in the first part of the poem, it initially demands more of its readers than does “X-ray Picture”; it attempts to engage readers more deeply, Page 303 →to have them think more carefully about the implications of replacing soil, water, and other “natural” substances with asphalt. Yet the poem stops here. It describes and criticizes, but, with a nod to acquiescence, does not indicate how or even whether conditions might be improved. “Death God” begins with a chicken strolling on the asphalt that surrounds an apartment complex. The poem first claims this sight “pitiful” (ch’amdam), then asks, “A chicken / on / as, phalt— / isn't something wrong?” . Not pausing long enough to answer his question, leaping from a single chicken to life itself, the poem's speaker exclaims, “Life, / aha, / life / aha—isn't it / entirely unpleasant? / Epileptic vigor resolutely / passes by, the universe bubbles / then collapses.” The speaker divulges the source of his cynicism and his basis for concluding that all has disintegrated: except for one strolling chicken and flowers atop graves, there are no plants or animals in this paved-over city. Nor is there water or soil. Even human hearts and minds have disappeared. The chicken's only companions are cars, sulfur dioxide, and noise: Alas! Where is the soil? Where are the insects? Where is the water? Where are the other chickens? Too joyful, asphalt Ludi, atop, crous, being this way chicken, in this city blanketed in the black asphalt of development headed toward death… What do you peck at? Do you peck at a car? Do you peck at sulfur dioxide? Do you peck at noise? We now have neither human hearts nor wriggling life to peck. There are not even minds like genuine blood to be pecked with living blood scattered. Baffled by the absence of soil, insects, water, and other chickens, and declaring the asphalt “too joyful” (nmu

word “ludicrous” as it earlier did “asphalt.” The speaker is mystified as to how the chicken has managed to stay alive with so little to eat. Questions about the location of soil, insects, water, and other chickens are followed by those concerning the chicken's diet, the speaker asking rhetorically whether the animal pecks at their replacements: cars, sulfur dioxide, and noise. He then declares that neither human hearts nor “wriggling life” (kkumt’lkrinn saengmyng) remain, the blackened hearts of Yi Hynggi's “X-ray Picture” having disappeared. Blood too has vanished, and with it minds to peck for sustenance as well as solutions. The lost minds appear to include the speaker's own. Indeed, rather than indicate how the transformed internal and external environments might be offset, the speaker instead suddenly turns on the chicken, making the animal his scapegoat. “Death God” ends ironically, labeling this “flightless bird,” rather than those who paved over landscapes and their machines, as the “bringer of ruin” and the true “death god of civilization” (munmyng i sasin). Questions for the chicken have been replaced by declarations, making the speaker's desolation appear absolute. Writing about the conditions of this city smothered in pavement has transformed his frustration into despair, allowing no room for questioning, much less remediation; the poem resigns itself to current conditions, giving no solutions and in fact going so far as to suggest their impossibility. Underscoring impossibility even more boldly is Cho Sehi's “City of Machines.”37 This popular story, published in the final years of Park Chung Hee's oppressive regime and part of Cho Sehi's legendary and well-traveled linkedstory novel Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf (1978), is a trenchant exposé of the human-induced environmental demise of the imaginary Korean city of ngang and the abuse of its residents, many of whom have little choice but to work in the city's toxic factories. Written in clear and simple syntax, “City of Machines” also includes several tables providing statistics on such things as motive for employment (ch’wip tonggi) in the factories and degree of job-related fatigue (chagp p’irodo).38 These numbers are ultimately overpowered by narrative, “City of Machines” showing that statistics communicate very little of the actual suffering to which people have been subjected. Reflecting the human and environmental tragedies of Korea and Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s, the narrative depicts most individuals as trapped within unforgiving political and social systems that make altering the status quo nearly impossible. To be sure, when asked, 41.3 percent of workers claim that they believe that in Korea anyone who works diligently, consumes Page 305 →frugally, and saves can live well (chal sal su itta); only 3.8 percent believe this “utterly impossible” (tojhi an doenda).39 But in truth, resignation becomes almost a requirement of survival. “City of Machines” highlights the near-universal axiom that people with the most incentive to enact change have the least ability to do so and those with the greatest ability have the least incentive. The story takes place in a single Korean city, but it is primarily a narrative about Korea under Park Chung Hee. On the other hand, many of the dynamics it describes have counterparts in other industrializing societies. Conditions in ngang severely compromise both human and nonhuman lives: abuse of nature is deeply intertwined with harm to people. In an archetypal case of informational ambiguity, children learn about the city's history as an international trading port and subsequent development into a leading industrial hub. They are told that “The ngang Industrial Zone flourishes with the metal, ceramic, chemical, oil and fat, shipbuilding, lumber, sheet glass, textile, electronic, automobile, and steel industries. Particularly the sheet glass industry, which is given in textbooks as Korea's best.”40 This impressive if tedious list of prosperous industries belies the tremendous price they have exacted from both people and their nonhuman surroundings, a cost children are not taught in school but one they know all too intimately from their daily lives: Jet black smoke ascends from countless soaring smokestacks, and machines whirl in factories. Workers labor in the factories. So too do the children of the dead dwarf. Mixed into the air of these places are noxious gases and smoke, as well as dust. All the factories spew out a dark to yellowishbrown river of wastewater and waste oil, proportionate to the volume of their production. Factory wastewater emitted upstream is used by other factories. Spewed out again, it flows down-stream until it enters the ocean. ngang's inner harbor has festered into a rotten sea. Organisms that live around the factory are gradually dying off.41 What the children also are not told in school but what their parents witness regularly is that factory workers not only are made ill by toxic substances but also are physically abused by their superiors. Unlike the degradation described in Tanikawa's “Small Birds” and Ch’oe Sngho's “Below the Water,” which is

cannot escape notice. Responses to pollution vary among the four key players featured in “City of Machines”—the factory workers (most of whom live in Page 306 →ngang and its environs), residents of ngang who do not work in the factories, Yunho (a young man from a privileged background with considerable interest in the workers’ welfare), and those in power (industry leaders). Significantly, although motives differ, acquiescence and resignation dominate throughout. Industry executives appear well aware of the damage their factories have inflicted on their employees, on the other residents of ngang, and on environments.42 They are the one group that could effectively remediate and prevent future destruction. But they instead actively thwart any such attempts. Not only are these men concerned almost solely with financial gain, but also they live and work from the safety of Seoul, unaffected by the pollution for which they are responsible. Like other residents of Seoul who visit ngang to catch clams and crabs, species unavailable closer to home, they presumably “try not to see the oil floating on the surface of the water.”43 In this they resemble the tourists depicted in Ch’oe Sngho's poem “Below the Water” who ignore the mound of garbage growing on the lakebed below. Chances are that only after they or their families become ill from eating poisoned seafood will they consider adopting business practices that protect environmental health. As is true of many texts that address human damage to environments, Cho Sehi's story depicts those with the greatest discretion to enact change as having the least inclination to upset the status quo. Feelings of powerlessness prompt the other three (groups of) potential activists in “City of Machines”—Yunho, factory laborers, and residents of ngang who do not work in the factories—to acquiesce, except for moments of revolt or thoughts of revolt.44 These individuals believe the economic, social, and political systems behind environmental corruption impossible to reform, and thus the corruption itself impossible to overcome. Variations of the phrase “nothing can be done” (uriga hal su innn il n ps), repeated throughout the text by different characters, haunt this fatalistic narrative. Early in “City of Machines” Yunho's apathy toward poverty and pollution resembles that of the factory owners. The story opens with comments on how removed he is from the harsh realities of the destitute underclass that supplies labor for ngang's prestigious factories. Poverty, pollution, and population are simply vocabulary words that he needs to know for his university entrance examination but that he ironically appears to find somewhat challenging to learn. As the nation suffers from drought and record heat, Yunho sits in the comfort of his quiet, air-conditioned home, with “nothing to worry about”: The air conditioner his father had installed blew out cold air without a sound. If one day he heard that the city looming largely in his mind Page 307 →had suddenly ceased to exist, he would simply have studied for the exam in his comfortable setting. The city of ngang remained like a dark picture in Yunho's mind…This high school graduate preparing to retake the entrance examinations hadn't ever thought about injustice. Even pingon he had understood only as the English word poverty, included in Current English. Because poverty often came up together with population and pollution, he had memorized them as the 3P's in the hopes of remembering them. In school, at the cram school, or in study groups, these were the things that were taught.45 In contrast, “City of Machines” concludes with Yunho “colliding against some moral core” (ttn todkchgin haeksim kwa matpuditch’ytta). The quiet of the opening pages has disappeared. Instead, surfacing in Yunho's mind is “the city of ngang, stuffed with jet black machines.” Unlike before, Yunho mutters to himself that “this [oppression] must end right now…Let's get organized.”46 As the curtain falls on the text, he leaves open the door for active efforts to transform environments. The changes in Yunho between the opening and closing of “City of Machines” are readily apparent. Cho Sehi's story begins and ends with the city of ngang “surfacing in Yunho's mind” (m rissoge…ngangsiga ttollatta).47 But while in the first paragraph the narrator claims that if ngang suddenly disappeared Yunho would barely notice (something he shares with the people featured in Tanikawa's “Small Birds”), in the final lines of “City of Machines” he commits himself to assisting those who toil in the city's factories. Early in the story the narrator reveals that as a result of his interactions with an impoverished dwarf and his family

Yunho begins to think more about the city and its people; the 3 P's become more than words to him. Yunho is so obsessed with the dwarf's death, believing it marks the “end of an era,” that he talks about it even while intimate with women.48 His girlfriends chastise him for so doing, but he insists on respecting the humanity of those less privileged. When one woman beseeches him to stop talking about the dwarf because he sounds like an insect, Yunho counters that she should show the dwarf more respect: the dwarf is a human being, he argues, and she is an insect. Yunho likewise feels sympathy for the dwarf's children, who are forced to work in abominable circumstances. But he believes himself powerless to help them. He speaks with the dwarf's eldest son about conditions in the factories and is surprised at what he hears. The narrator declares that Yunho “knows what the dwarf's eldest son wants [namely, a new labor union]” but is convinced that “there wasn't a single thing [he] could do for the dwarf's Page 308 →children.”49 This sentiment is repeated several pages later, when the dwarf's eldest son asks Yunho if he can use the latter's home as a staging area for an assassination; the dwarf's son believes he must murder Yunho's neighbor because the latter is the director of the ngang Group. Yunho refuses to comply, and the narrator reiterates that “there is nothing he can do to help the dwarf's son.”50 What Yunho does not yet recognize is that helping this young man, and by extension this young man's neighbors, coworkers, and even the natural world, does not necessarily mean submitting to demands for violence or even for a new labor union.51 There might be “nothing” Yunho can or wants to do to help this young man form a union, much less kill the person largely responsible for his misery, but there likely are other possibilities. Yunho recognizes this in the story's final lines, when he declares that conditions can no longer continue unchanged, that protestors must organize. His belief that assisting others requires following their precise demands is replaced with confidence in his own convictions. In addition to providing him close physical access to the managers of ngang's industries, Yunho's privileged background affords him insights into their practices and personalities that might be helpful in devising effective reform strategies. Even so, the extent to which Yunho will be allowed to follow through is unclear. Considering the record of factory management, it is doubtful he will get far. Even more defenseless than Yunho are the laborers and other residents of ngang. Signaling his desperation, the dwarf's eldest son believes that his only recourse is murdering the director of the ngang Group; he judges his dream of forming a new labor union unattainable and cannot conceive of any other way to improve the lives of the workers. He laments to Yunho “There's nothing we can do” before revealing his assassination plans.52 The narrator confirms that this is likely the case, noting that Yunho just has learned that the factories in ngang are managed by the same small group of people who control the economic lives of all Koreans. Petitions, protests, and strikes, not to mention the slaying of someone of national importance by a disgruntled employee, would probably result in even harsher working conditions and hardly curtail damage to ecosystems. The laborers do nothing because there seems to be nothing they can do. More complex is the situation of the people who live in ngang but do not work in the factories. The narrator initially comments on their proclivity for the word “stifling” (kapkaphada), which accurately describes both the physical position of their town (surrounded by ocean on three sides) and their personalities (plagued by doubts). Living in a socially managed society, these individuals are depicted as having resigned themselves to being Page 309 →smothered by the natural world, by others, and by themselves. As the narrator notes: “There is not a single person there who would voice displeasure at restrictions on individual activity for the sake of maintaining order.”53 In many ways these people are as helpless as the laborers. Residents of ngang depend on the wind to drive out to sea the toxic gases and smoke that hover above the industrial district. One night the wind unexpectedly changes direction and smog settles over the residential district, inciting chaos. Nearly suffocating inside their homes, people throng the streets, hoping for cleaner air in other parts of town but finding little relief. Although long aware of the factories as polluters, they at last realize that they are living amid “perilous biological conditions, without precedent in ngang's history.”54 For the first time they decide to do something to remedy their situation but not surprisingly are quickly deterred: “[These people] thought that the following day they would attempt to solve the problem. But they immediately crashed into a large barrier and ended up retreating dejectedly. The leaders of ngang were in Seoul.”55 The residents of ngang rally their strength, hoping to convene a public meeting or put on a display of force, only to discover that such acts are prohibited. Their response, the narrator indicates, is simply to “open their mouths” (ibl pllytta).56 This phrasing suggests that they have not yet given up but do not know how to

proceed; their mouths are open as if to speak, but words have yet to be formed. On the other hand, the narrator soon reveals that ngang residents actually have been and likely will continue doing no more than checking on the direction of the wind before turning in for the night: “The people of ngang stop here. They don't think about the workers of the industrial zone that daily spills more than a hundred thousand tons of wastewater into the ocean. As long as the wind stays over the industrial zone and does not again blow toward the residential district, they will not be awakened from their deep sleep.”57 In other words, as long as they think they personally are not affected by the poisonous gas and smoke emanating from factories, the people of ngang will do nothing to help the workers, much less the natural world. Acquiescence is easy to castigate, particularly when the welfare of so many is at stake. Certainly it might be argued that the factory workers could be more imaginative in combating abuse by their employers, that ngang residents could be more proactive in attempting to curb factory emissions, and that Yunho could take better advantage of his family's high standing to improve conditions for both people and the environment. But “City of Machines” suggests that even if workers were more imaginative, residents more proactive, and Yunho a better schemer, the tyranny of those in power Page 310 →is so great that it would be almost impossible to effect change. The fleeting calls for action indicate a desire for reform, but the narrative suggests that it cannot be actualized anytime soon. Like many creative works concerned with environmental justice, “City of Machines” depicts human suffering and nonhuman devastation as deeply intertwined. Cho Sehi's story most obviously critiques the many sacrifices to human and nonhuman welfare that have been made in the name of rapid industrialization. It also clearly censures a social system that prohibits critique of these sacrifices. But, just as important, it negotiates human responses to human and nonhuman suffering and devastation in light of such prohibitions. It depicts the powerlessness of people who have done very little to repair environments both inside and outside the factories not because they do not recognize the dangers of current conditions, not because they do not want conditions to improve, but because there are virtually no opportunities for them even to attempt to do so.

Necessity, Compulsion, and Actively Damaging Environments Writings such as “City of Machines” highlight ecological degradation that, although disparaged, for various reasons goes almost unchallenged. Other texts take this conundrum to a logical extreme: damage not only is accepted unchallenged but also is accelerated, regardless of predictable and undesirable consequences. Powerfully depicting this phenomenon is the Chinese writer Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem (2004).58 Despite Jiang Rong's refusal to help market his novel, and despite harsh critiques of the novel's aesthetics, Wolf Totem was an overnight bestseller, received numerous literary awards, was adapted into other media both in China and abroad, and was quickly translated into nearly twenty languages, thereby enjoying a truly cosmopolitan following.59 Not surprisingly, considering Jiang Rong's long-standing interest in literature, Wolf Totem draws on an array of Chinese and foreign writings on wolves.60 It also is one of many Chinese creative texts—including A Cheng's King of Trees (Chapter 2) and Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain (Chapter 4)—that expose both the human and the environmental abuses that took place during China's Cultural Revolution. The novel is based on Jiang Rong's experiences in Inner Mongolia between 1967 and 1978, the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Unlike many of the creative works examined in this book, most of the social and environmental problems it discusses are particular to China, especially Inner Mongolia. Without question, Page 311 →Wolf Totem's explicit condemnations of Chinese society, elaborated on below, are part of what makes it a novel of great consequence. But as Jiang Rong himself argues in the afterword of the Japanese translation of his novel, the dynamics he describes have counterparts throughout the world; the traumas portrayed are not unique to China: “The novel's popularity wasn't surprising. The vitality of the world's cities is withering, and life is becoming increasingly hollow. Readers show strong interest in this work, filled as it is with wild, primitive vitality. And themes such as the spirit of freedom and independence, consciousness of environmental protection, the clash of civilizations, and national characteristics are global hotspots [hottosupotto].”61 Wolf Totem is a work of world literature that attempts to encompass the world. The novel follows Chen Zhen, a young Beijing intellectual who during the Cultural Revolution is sent to Inner

Mongolia's Olonbulag as part of a production team and becomes enthralled with the region's human and nonhuman occupants.62 He witnesses an influx of Han Chinese (hanren, hanzu, China's most populous ethnic group) into the Inner Mongolian grasslands, the resulting transformation of the landscape from a space of nomadic herding to grain cropping, and the extermination of the area's wolves.63 Decades later, when Chen Zhen and his friend Yang Ke return to Inner Mongolia, they discover that much of the grassland has become desert. Particles from this arid region spread well beyond the Olonbulag; Wolf Totem concludes in 2002 with Beijing shrouded in its sand. In the words of the Chilean writer Luis Ramiro Sepúlveda, the settlers have “constructed the masterpiece of the civilized man: the desert” (construyendo la obra maestro del hombre civilizado: el desierto).64 Desertification counters sinicization: just as the Han Chinese brought chaos to the people and landscapes of Inner Mongolia, so too are sands from Inner Mongolia wreaking havoc on the Han Chinese capital.65 Throughout Wolf Totem the narrator explicitly contrasts the Mongols not with Chinese but with the Han people, or Han Chinese. Moreover, although differences between Red Guards and the many Chinese forced to relocate to the countryside were often substantial, Wolf Totem minimizes these gaps to underline those between the Mongols and the Han. The degradation of the Inner Mongolian grasslands evokes a variety of ambiguities, those between attitudes and behaviors (e.g., loving nature to death, discussed in Chapter 7) and the focus of this chapter, those between behaviors and physical conditions: Mongols knowingly allow and even participate in the destruction of their own grasslands; Han Chinese destroy multiple ecosystems in Inner Mongolia despite the Mongols’ repeated warnings that so doing is unnecessary and will have undesired, enduring consequences; Page 312 →both in Inner Mongolia and China proper the Han Chinese continue to birth more children than they can feed or ecosystems can sustain. All three environmental ambiguities result from some degree of (perceived) necessity and compulsion. The first stems primarily from (perceived) necessity; the Mongols believe themselves out of options, that improving their standard of living and providing a better future for their children depend on following Han Chinese directives to reshape the grassland's ecosystems. In contrast, the second ambiguity arises partially from (perceived) need but largely from the compulsion for self-aggrandizement. The Han Chinese think that radically reshaping the grasslands will allow for the most efficient use of Inner Mongolian territory. On the other hand, their behaviors are depicted as regularly and unnecessarily bordering on the extreme; rather than attempt to live in harmony with the land, they are obsessed with completely overturning its existing social and biological environments. The third ambiguity derives mainly from willful compulsion; the novel depicts Han Chinese as aware that overpopulation is a significant problem, yet as excessively driven to procreate. Throughout Wolf Totem the narrator and characters sharply contrast Mongol and Han Chinese attitudes and behaviors toward environments. The Mongols for centuries have respected the delicate ecological balance of the grasslands and engaged in symbiotic relationships with animals and vegetation. In contrast, the Han Chinese do not appreciate the region's ecosystems and recklessly decimate them in their quest to transform the land from a space of nomadism to one of agrarian settlements.66 Differences between Mongol and Han Chinese attitudes toward and treatment of wolves are particularly striking. The narrator and characters of Wolf Totem repeatedly emphasize how the Mongols believe that the wolves are not only responsible for centuries of Mongol glory, which paradoxically included killing more people and taking over more territory than the Chinese, but are also indispensable in maintaining the homeostasis of the grasslands.67 The Mongols do hunt wolves; early winter, with its fresh snows that the animals have some difficulty navigating, is dubbed “funeral season for wolves” (xinxue chudong shi lang de sangji).68 But the Mongols hunt judiciously and are careful to safeguard wolf populations. Han Chinese, on the other hand, are depicted as fearing and even despising wolves. These attitudes, stemming from baseless yet allegedly inherent prejudices, play a large part in the Han Chinese resolve to eradicate wolves from the Mongolian grasslands. The relationship of the Mongols with nonhuman inhabitants changes dramatically as the Han Chinese advance into Inner Mongolia. The Mongols know all too well that exterminating wolves and converting the rangeland into farms eventually will have devastating outcomes for both the human Page 313 →and nonhuman residents of the region. Yet they believe themselves helpless to stop or modify the Han Chinese agenda. Many in fact collaborate with the Han Chinese, assenting to and even actively participating in transforming the region. The most obvious example is Bao Shungui, “a Mongol who long ago forgot about his Mongol forebears [and who] hates wolves

even more than the Han Chinese,” who now serves as a “military representative” for the Han Chinese.69 Mongols also participate in the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps, organized by Han Chinese. The first group of cadres from this corps sent into the field are “half Mongols, half Han Chinese” (yiban mengzu yiban hanzu) and their first duty is exterminating wolves.70 The Mongols greatly revere wolves, recognizing the vital role they play in maintaining the health of the region's ecosystems. Yet Han Chinese rhetoric against wolves is so persuasive that most Mongols do not actively protest the extermination of these animals. The Han Chinese argue that removing wolves from the grasslands is necessary if these spaces are to be reclaimed for mechanized agriculture. Converting grazing land to farms, they assert, will “eradicate damage caused by wolves, diseases, insects, and rats, and greatly strengthen the ability of the grasslands to resist natural disasters such as blizzards and shortfalls of snow [which dry out the land in winter], drought [during other seasons], windstorms, conflagrations, and insect pestilence.”71 This in turn will make life easier for the Mongols. One of their top priorities, the Han Chinese claim, is “allowing the herders, who for thousands of years had lived under difficult conditions and had experienced much hardship and suffering, gradually to settle down to lives of stability and happiness.”72 To sweeten the deal, the Han Chinese promise to build the Mongols brick houses with tiled roofs, as well as “roads, schools, hospitals, post offices, auditoriums, stores, movie theaters, etc.,” creating livable towns.73 Mesmerized by lists of disasters that will be averted and catalogs of buildings and infrastructure that will be constructed, all the Mongolian educated youth and young herders, and the majority of the women and children, are said to look forward to the arrival of the Han Chinese. In contrast, the majority of middle-aged and elderly herders, described simply as “keeping silent” (mo bu zuo sheng) appear to have resigned themselves to a future on Han Chinese terms.74 The Mongol elder Bilige's lament to Chen Zhen captures the ambivalent attitudes of the older men: We've long hoped for a school for our children and that our sick would no longer have to be taken to the banner alliance hospital by oxcart or horse-drawn wagon. We don't have a hospital, so many have died who shouldn't have. But what's to be done with the grassland? The Page 314 →grassland is too flimsy. The volume of livestock being transported is already too heavy. The grassland is a woodenwheeled oxcart that can carry only a certain number of people and animals. If more people and machines are added, the cart will overturn. When the grassland is overturned, you Han Chinese can return to your original homes. But what are the herders to do?75 Bilige and other herders know that Han Chinese plans for the region are not sustainable, that the stability and happiness they have been promised will be fleeting. At the same time, they—unlike their counterparts in the American writer Frank Waters's People of the Valley (1941) and the Maori writer Patricia Grace's novel Potiki—succumb to promises of a more comfortable life for themselves and their families.76 So they not only do not resist the Han Chinese incursion, they also join in transforming the region along Han Chinese guidelines. Wolf Totem depicts Han Chinese environmental ambiguity—destroying multiple ecosystems in Inner Mongolia despite warnings from the Mongols that so doing is unnecessary and will end badly—as stemming less from (perceived) necessity than from self-aggrandizement and desire for profit. The German writer Christa Wolf similarly questions this conundrum in Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day's News, 1987), a novel that juxtaposes description of the protagonist's brother's brain surgery with the news of Chernobyl: “At which crossroads did evolution with us humans possibly miscarry, that we have coupled satisfying desires with the urge to destroy” (An welchem Kreuzweg ist womöglich die Evolution bei uns Menschen fehlgelaufen, daßwir Lustbefriedigung an Zerstörungsdrang gekoppelt haben).77 Han Chinese move into Inner Mongolia for many reasons, not the least of which is their putative need for more land for their rapidly growing population. They believe that it is in the Chinese national interest to populate the Olonbulag and to use its rich soil for farmland. The Mongols warn them that this will result only in disaster, that the land will not be able to support such activities for more than a generation, but the Han Chinese pay no heed. Significantly, Han Chinese are not simply searching for additional farmland. Wolf Totem depicts them as obsessed

with overturning ecosystems, even delighting in the mass slaughter of entire species, regardless of the consequences. Han Chinese relationships with canines, and wolves in particular, are revealed as particularly fraught. From the novel's opening chapters the narrator features Mongols emphasizing to the new arrivals that the grasslands depend entirely on wolves; without wolves, these landscapes will perish within several years. The grasslands, the Mongols argue, have flourished for Page 315 →thousands of years because wolves have controlled gazelle, squirrel, rabbit, field mouse, and other animal populations; if wolves are wiped out and these populations grow too large, they will soon destroy the grassland's ecosystems and transform the Olonbulag into a lifeless desert. The Mongols also explain to the Han Chinese that were it not for wolves, both natural and human-induced disasters would have exacted a far greater toll on people, animals, and vegetation. For instance, a severe blizzard can claim large quantities of livestock. When this happens, after the snow melts, carcasses of dead animals litter the ground. Without wolves to consume the carcasses, their stench quickly contaminates the air. Even worse, carcasses are prime breeding grounds for epidemics such as the plague. Likewise, in past wars fought on the Olonbulag wolves disposed of thousands of bodies, both human and nonhuman; this too spared survivors from the plague. The Mongol view that wolves strengthen the ability of grassland inhabitants to resist natural and humaninduced disasters ironically contradicts Han Chinese assertions that slaughtering wolves and reclaiming grasslands for mechanized agriculture will fortify the landscape against devastation.78 But Wolf Totem depicts hatred of wolves as having penetrated the Han Chinese psyche so deeply that the Mongols cannot convince them that nothing justifies the mass slaughter of these animals.79 The Han Chinese see wolves as a destructive, evil force, one that must be exterminated as rapidly as possible. Their misconceptions of these animals are profound, creating beliefs that sharply contradict the evidence presented by the Mongols. The narrator cites the example of a Red Guard leader who claims that wolves are class enemies and as such must be destroyed: “Wolves truly are class enemies [lang zhen shi jieji diren]. Reactionaries [fandongpai] in all parts of the world are all wildly ambitious wolves. Wolves are too ruthless…We need to organize the masses to hunt them down and apply the proletarian dictatorship [wuchan jieji zhuanzheng] against all wolves. We must resolutely and thoroughly wipe wolves off the face of the earth.”80 The term “class enemy” here refers primarily to so-called reactionary elements, particularly technocrats, within the Chinese Communist Party.81 When the Red Guard speaks of “reactionaries,” he means those with elitist, antiegalitarian attitudes who prioritize education and other bourgeois practices over reliance on the sheer energy of the people, and by so doing increase the gap between rich and poor. As the Red Guard's comments suggest, these individuals (reactionaries, class enemies) were heavily persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Interesting here is how the Red Guard mixes metaphors and species: just as “wolves” are “class enemies,” so too are “reactionaries” wolves, and “wildly ambitious” ones (yexinlang) at that. Conflating and attacking everything that stands in Page 316 →their way, both human and nonhuman, the Red Guards ruthlessly eradicate seemingly subversive elements. Not all Han Chinese in Inner Mongolia were convinced that wolves were real enemies of the people; many of the individuals sent to rural China did not yield to the rhetoric of the Red Guards, but most believed wolves needed to be destroyed. More striking even than the disjuncture between attitudes and conditions is a second ambiguity: the gap between behaviors and conditions. Despite the Mongols’ many warnings, the Han Chinese, both Red Guards and students, maniacally massacre the wolves of the Olonbulag. As Chen Zhen's friend Zhang Jiyuan angrily exclaims: Everyone's gone mad about skinning the wolves. Marksmen and members of the people's militia use trucks and cars because of all the gasoline and ammunition they need. Even doctors are participating. They inject into the bone marrow of dead sheep a powerful colorless and odorless poison they've gotten from Beijing. Then they throw the sheep back into the wild. I don't know how many wolves they've killed. Even more terrible are the road repair crews that accompany the Han Chinese troops. They're versatile with their weapons. They even invented a way to blow up wolves: they insert the explosives they use to destroy mountains and mine stone into sheep bones, cover the bones with sheep fat, and leave them where groups of wolves appear. The wolves need bite only one of these bones for their heads to fly off. The workers have put the sheep-bomb bones everywhere. They've also blown up many of the dogs belonging to the herders. The wolves of the grassland have landed themselves in the boundless open sea of the people's war [caoyuan lang xianru le renmin zhanzheng

de wangyang dahai]. Everywhere people are singing, “Generation after generation, we won't stop fighting until we've exterminated all the chailang [cruel and evil people, lit. jackals and wolves].”82

Zhang Jiyuan not only outlines techniques Han Chinese use to slaughter wolves, he also underlines the interconnectedness between abuse of people and that of animals. Likened to counterrevolutionaries, wolves and other canines are equally at the mercy of rabid revolutionaries. Han Chinese behaviors correspond to their perceptions of wolves, grasslands, and national dynamics, indicating yawning disengagement from Mongol realities. Initially, the land supports crop growth. This, together with the increased infrastructure and machinery provided by the Chinese, temporarily makes the Mongols’ lives more comfortable. But in the end, the concerns of Page 317 →Bilige and other Mongols prove well founded. Parts of the grasslands soon enough become barren. The narrator notes that by 1975, a mere six or seven years after the great wolf extermination, farming had turned the once lush Majuzi River area into desert. When several decades later Chen Zhen and Yang Ke revisit Inner Mongolia, their worst fears are realized. And in the spring of 2002 Chen Zhen learns that 80 percent of the Olonbulag pastureland has become desert. Refusing to listen to people most familiar with the land, the Han Chinese severely damage the very territory to which they had been seduced by the prospect of developing a flourishing, “modern” frontier.83 The third ambiguity addressed in Wolf Totem concerns human population. Late in the novel one of the Mongols urges his people to practice birth control, arguing that the grasslands cannot sustain a further increase in population. But most of the comments in Jiang Rong's narrative concerning population have to do with the excessive numbers of Han Chinese: Han Chinese bear more children than they can feed or ecosystems can sustain. Having exhausted resources in other parts of China, they believe Inner Mongolia a last hope. As one of Chen Zhen's friends laments, “Millions of peasants risk their lives giving birth, and risk their lives opening up new land. Each year the population of an entire province is born. Who can block that much excess population from forcibly entering the grasslands?”84 The Mongols also criticize the Han Chinese for their large population, one emphasizing to Chen Zhen: Hinterland Chinese are having too many children. The entire nation is short of meat and is short of fat. The entire nation depends on the beef and lamb of Inner Mongolia…When you demand our meat, what you in fact are demanding is our grass. If you continue demanding it, the grasslands will be destroyed…Several banners [qi] in the southeast quickly were overburdened and became desert.85 Mongols are very aware of how ecosystems function, and they are quick to condemn what China's fast-growing population has done to landscapes in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China. The repeated references to Han Chinese as producing more people than they can feed, then relieving population pressures by damaging already fragile landscapes, invoke one of the most fundamental environmental ambiguities: failing to restrain population growth in even the most extreme conditions. Han Chinese criticize the Mongols for their “primitive” methods and ways of thinking, stressing that China and the world have entered the atomic age, an age in which satellites circle Page 318 →the earth and animals such as wolves are no longer needed. But the novel stresses that for all China's scientific advances, problems as basic as how to feed its burgeoning population are becoming more acute. The Han Chinese are well aware of the environmental problems caused by their high birthrates, but for a multitude of reasons, some related to necessity but others to desire, they do not attempt to moderate reproduction. In this and other ways Wolf Totem highlights some of the many contradictions between behaviors and ecological conditions that are implicated in the degradation of environments. Jiang Rong's novel depicts people as readily dismissing information on environmental degradation; it shows them disregarding incontrovertible physical evidence of the ruinous results of harming ecosystems out of a desire for increased power and profit, or simply more comfortable lives.

Denying Disavowals Many literary works that address human-induced environmental disruption portray disavowing this

damage—acquiescing to it by denying responsibility for ecodegradation and/or knowing about but dismissing (potential) ecodegradation—as a common response to and facilitator of compromised ecosystems. This disjuncture between behaviors and irrefutable physical conditions is evident in Wolf Totem, where Han Chinese refuse to recognize that annihilating the wolf population of Inner Mongolia and transforming its grasslands into farms will destabilize ecosystems in the region as well as in other parts of China. In some literary texts, disavowal plays an even more central role: certain narratives accentuate the extent to which governments, corporations, citizens’ groups, and individuals will go to refute that environmental degradation exists or, when overwhelming evidence to the contrary makes such denial impossible, to reject responsibility for it, minimize its seriousness, and strive to expunge it from public consciousness. The Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko's Sea of Suffering highlights this process. In Chapter 2, the discussion of this novel focused on the contradictory attitudes toward the nonhuman exhibited by the narrator and many residents of Minamata.86 Here I am concerned with how Ishimure's novel shows disconnects between obvious physical evidence (nonhuman spaces that are clearly polluted; people who are unquestionably disfigured) and the behaviors (disavowals, including both active denials and conscious indifference) of many in the Japanese government, the Chisso Corporation, and residents of Minamata and surrounding towns. More so than many creative texts on environmental degradation, Sea of Suffering interweaves scientific, medical, and journalistic reports with stories, Page 319 →including deeply personal accounts, not only to underscore the interdependence of these different narrative strategies but also to emphasize the need to understand devastated environments from many perspectives.87 Often, the relatively detached rhetoric of science, medicine, and journalism is exposed as insufficient to capture the true tragedies of Minamata disease. But as the following pages reveal, these more “objective” reports make the behaviors of those in government and industry, as well as of local residents, appear even more reprehensible. Although most creative texts concerned with damage to environments acknowledge indifference toward and denials of this damage, Sea of Suffering is one of a subset that stresses the central role of these behaviors in causing and facilitating environmental degradation. More so than many narratives, it also specifies the reasons behind such disavowals, as well as their consequences. The novel devotes significant attention to alternatives, contrasting denials of Minamata disease with the great compassion for the afflicted demonstrated not only by the families and close friends of Minamata patients but also by the Japanese medical community and sometimes by members of groups known primarily for their disavowals.88 Incorporating other instances of industrial pollution both in Japan and abroad, Ishimure's text eloquently exposes denial of environmental degradation as a nearly global phenomenon, one endemic in human societies. On the other hand, the disavowals do not go unchallenged. Many individuals featured in Sea of Suffering, not to mention the narrator and the novel itself, actively reject their validity. Early in the novel the narrator cites Sensuke, an elderly man who succumbed to Minamata disease, as having declared his a “disgraceful, unsightly illness” . The narrator claims that these terms describe not only the disease but also those “who caused this incident, concealed it, disregarded it, and tried to make people forget about it.”89 Most reprehensible, according to the narrator, is the Chisso Corporation. In 1959 scientists prepared a report indicating that Chisso's daily discharges of toxic, mercury-laden wastewater into Minamata Bay were the likely cause of Minamata disease.90 Yet rather than cooperate in subsequent investigations, for many years the corporation did everything it could to deny its role in propagating this disease, including pumping wastewater under cover of night and prohibiting scientists from taking samples from the bay. The narrator describes some Chisso employees as sympathetic to the plight of Minamata patients, even alerting residents of Minamata to Chisso's plans to divert their wastewater channel to another location; similarly, researchers from the Chisso company hospital contribute to efforts to understand the disease better. And at its August 1967 meeting the Chisso First Union issued Page 320 →a declaration condemning its own failure to fight Minamata disease and affirming its commitment to do so in the future. But for the most part, Sea of Suffering paints Chisso as an absolute villain, one that denies any connection between factory wastewater and Minamata disease yet prohibits scientists from studying the wastewater; one that does everything it can to avoid paying indemnities and instead continues to discharge poisonous effluent, thus expanding the number of people who may demand compensation; and one that delays dispatching employees to visit hospitalized Minamata patients until 1965, more than a decade after the outbreak of the illness. The narrator comments: “Looked at from today's perspective, the noble and strong

personality and the superior investigative research of Dr. Hosokawa [one of the premier researchers of Minamata disease] into the outbreak and spread of Minamata disease provides a fantastic contrast with all the attitudes [and behaviors] exhibited by the Chisso Corporation.”91 Acknowledging Minamata disease belatedly in 1968 and only with great reluctance, the Japanese central government is described as largely responsible for facilitating Chisso's disavowals. This contrasts with local political bodies, which although relatively ineffective, show considerable concern with the spread of Minamata disease and establish various investigative groups. Yet throughout Sea of Suffering the narrator highlights the tragedy of this situation: the greater and more widespread the suffering of those affected physically or economically (fishers with no market for their contaminated catch, or even with nothing to catch), the greater and more persistent the efforts of those not affected to disregard their suffering, both Chisso and bystanders in the local population. Commenting on the presumably deliberate misperceptions of the local Public Health Department concerning Minamata disease, the narrator notes that “The strange illness continued to work its way steadily along the coast of the Shiranui Sea, moving from one village to another. The true nature of the strange illness was not officially declared, but the incidents and their ramifications slowly continued to tear apart people's lives and hearts.”92 Sea of Suffering underscores how national politicians and other government employees downplay if not disavow Minamata disease. To be sure, the central government is depicted as initially being concerned about the illness. The narrator notes that in 1957 the Ministry of Education established the Minamata Disease Comprehensive Research Group, a unit composed primarily not of Chisso officials but instead of presumably impartial doctors from Kumamoto University Medical School. The group's report identified organic mercury as the most likely cause of the disease and pointed to Chisso's practice of pouring untreated wastewater into Minamata Bay. Despite these Page 321 →findings, the Japanese government for many years did not prohibit Chisso from continuing to deposit outflow, nor did it enact measures to clean polluted waters or to help those stricken with Minamata disease. These disavowals of the significance of this illness marked the beginning of decades of frustrating struggles by Minamata patients and their families, with both the central government and Chisso. Like Chisso officials, national politicians and bureaucrats are depicted as disavowing Minamata disease for a variety of reasons: financial dependence of the town, region, and nation on industries like Chisso; inability to appreciate the suffering of Minamata disease patients and the significance of the damage inflicted on local ecosystems; and simple heartlessness, including the belief that because Minamata disease affected such a small, rural, and impoverished segment of the Japanese population it did not merit attention.93 This is particularly true of Japan's central government. In his report on the Minamata Disease Policy Committee's visit to Tokyo in 1957, City Assemblyperson Hirota Sunao recalls that officials in the Welfare Ministry not only had never heard of Minamata but upon learning that the disease affected mostly indigent fishers, claimed it too trivial a matter to pursue. Those who listened to their petition did so only to be polite and were eager to see them depart.94 The meeting in Minamata between Diet representatives and the Municipal Assembly two years later (November 2, 1959) is no more productive. The narrator describes this encounter as resembling a “cross-examination.”95 Diet members take advantage of the recently elected mayor's inexperience with politics and his relative unfamiliarity with Minamata disease and its effects on the town. The narrator laments: “Both the regional administration and the Diet were supposed to be looking out for the people, but it was inevitable that the meeting between the two sets of officials, with their different agendas, would become a confrontation between the authority of the Diet and the powerless impoverished.”96 The narrator speaks on several occasions of the national government's long history of disavowing industrial pollution, of its failure to confront much less prevent such occurrences. She reminds readers of the Ashio copper mine incident (1880s) and how the rights of local farmers near Ashio have yet to be recognized nearly a century later, indemnities have yet to be paid, and a commission has yet to be established to study Japan's first modern pollution event.97 And she accuses the Japanese government more generally as having “a policy of abandoning its people” (kono kuni no kimin seisaku).98 In 1968—fifteen years after the first instances of Minamata disease and four years after the first cases of mercury poisoning in Niigata (Niigata Minamata disease)—the Japanese government at last declares Chisso entirely responsible Page 322 →for Minamata disease. But the narrator is

quick to note that this admission by no means resolves the struggles of those afflicted with the disease. The most troubling disavowals of Minamata disease come from residents of the Minamata area who fear that acknowledging both the severity of water pollution and Chisso's culpability in instigating it will further destabilize the region's already precarious economy. Although a number of local government bodies take the disease seriously, many individuals chastise Minamata patients and other activists for threatening the welfare of their town. The narrator includes an article from the October 19, 1968 Kumamoto edition of the Mainichi shinbun (Mainichi Newspaper) describing the Development of Minamata City Citizens’ Conference. The conference prospectus chastises those residents who have been intent on having Chisso admit its wrongdoing and modify its behavior; conference participants support those afflicted by Minamata disease but insist on continued cooperation with Chisso. Significantly, disavowals by Chisso, the central government, and residents of the Minamata area forestall not only the prevention of further outbreaks of the disease, compensation to Minamata patients and their families, and remediation of environments but also further protests by Minamata activists. The narrator emphasizes what a difference it makes to be taken seriously by the authorities, not only in the form of increased outside intervention (more government regulation of and sanctions against polluters) but also in empowering the afflicted. One sad example is a meeting with Minamata fishers when Diet members visit the town (November 2, 1959). The fishers are delighted at the opportunity to share their experiences with the Japanese authorities, who treat them with respect and listen solemnly as they detail the crises facing their community. They are so emboldened by the compassion shown by Diet members that later that day several thousand of them hold a protest rally at the Chisso factory; the rally quickly turns violent, injuring several factory workers and dozens of fishers and police. The narrator declares it unlikely that the principal cause of these riots, as often is argued, was the inability of union leaders to control their subordinates. Instead, she claims that “The real essence of the problem lay elsewhere. The situation probably resulted from the fact that measures to fight Minamata disease have until today been almost entirely neglected…We can say that responsibility for the inauspicious incidents of November 2 lies with the lethargy of the authorities.”99 Had authorities at almost every level not had a history of disavowing the seriousness of Minamata disease, the meeting with Diet officials likely would not have made as deep an impression on the fishers and would not have inspired a riot. Yet the question is not whether the fishers storm the Chisso factory, but when. Had their problems Page 323 →been taken seriously by the authorities from the outset, those physically and economically affected by Minamata disease might, as the narrator suggests, never have felt the need to resort to violence. But there is also a strong possibility that they might have marched on the factory sooner. Earlier activism could have resulted in increased repression, as was the case in Cho Sehi's “City of Machines,” but it also might have motivated the authorities to respond more quickly to the pollution of the waters around Minamata, saving no small number of lives. Sea of Suffering exposes not only the terrible suffering experienced by those stricken with Minamata disease but also the many political, social, and economic forces that, in denying this suffering, allow it to proliferate. Ishimure's novel trenchantly reveals that even the most obviously debilitating conditions—as photojournalism such as W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith's revealed, Minamata disease is anything but a silent killer—are repudiated in the name of social stability and commercial profit. People are depicted not only as doing nothing when faced with ecodegradation but also as actively fighting against measures to remediate existing damage and prevent future harm to environments. In discussing Sea of Suffering, Chapter 2 noted the ecoambivalence of individuals who on the one hand idealize symbiotic, mutually beneficial contacts between people and their environments and on the other hand are concerned about the health of nonhuman bodies primarily because people depend on them.100 The present chapter's analysis of Ishimure's novel reinforces the concept that if even those with the strongest emotional bonds to the nonhuman are concerned with environmental health almost entirely because of its connection with human well-being, those who easily disregard human health are likely to show virtually no concern for the welfare of the natural world. In her afterword, the narrator of Sea of Suffer-ing declares hers a “fragment of a book.”101 The novel is hardly a fragment. But one important question it raises yet leaves unanswered is whether, with disparities between conditions and behaviors so extreme, with even the most obviously debilitating and painful disease so readily disavowed, there is any real hope of diminishing, much less

preempting, environmental crises.

Arresting Behaviors The Japanese actor and author Tsutsui Yasutaka's “Tatazumu hito” (Standing Person, 1974), written not long after Sea of Suffering, humorously spins the act of readily disavowing environmental problems by featuring a city that “greens” its streets and parks not by planting actual vegetation but instead Page 324 →by transforming into pillars and ultimately trees its cats, dogs, and people.102 The city vegetizes individuals who criticize the status quo; the more people who complain about anything from living conditions to government policy, the “greener” the city becomes; the city's “greenness” paradoxically signals not its environmental health, but instead the discontent of its residents and the authoritarianism of its leaders. Tsutsui's first-person narrator does not specify why particular cats and dogs are transformed into trees, but he suggests that vegetizing these creatures is the city's way of controlling its animal populations, both pets and strays. This short story most obviously parodies Japan's official ideal of shakai kanri (lit. [benign] social management), or the bureaucratically managed society. Such a culture retains order not by persecuting its people but instead by shaming them into conformity and in extreme cases figuratively vegetizing them. But in featuring a society that tries to establish ecological balance among people, animals, and plants through forced metamorphosis, “Standing Person” also satirizes the frequent superficiality and potential lethality of attempts to “green” urban spaces where the nonhuman population is for the most part confined to the animals people nurture (pets) and those they abandon (strays). Tsutsui's short story features a city so crowded and so lacking in greenery that people are excited to spend time in a small space among just a handful of trees. In the opening paragraph the narrator comments: “I turned my feet toward the park. In the morning no children came to that small space of fewer than 70 square meters in the middle of a cramped residential area. It was quiet there, so I made it part of my morning walk. These days in the small city even the limited green of the park's ten or so trees is priceless.”103 These three sentences (in Japanese) draw attention to the city's oppressing confinement: the park is “small” (chiisai) at less than 70 square meters and the residential area that houses it is “cramped” (sesekomashii). The number of real trees is unclear; not all the park's trees originated as trees, and the vegetation in this space consists at least in part of former dogs. “Standing Person” quickly reveals that this phenomenon is not confined to this particular site. The narrator speaks with an elderly gentleman who is feeding one of the park's dog-pillars ( inubashira) and learns that he does so because it reminds him of his own pet, who at three years old was transformed into one of these plants and now, set beside the coast road, has “completely vegetized” ( kanzen ni shokubutsuka).104 At age four the narrator's own dog was commandeered but was not fed properly, so died shortly after it was planted. The city attempts to nourish animalpillars with a fleet of liquid fertilizer trucks but is not always successful. Page 325 → Not understanding why the city is intent on turning its animals into plants, the narrator offers several possibilities: I went out onto the main thoroughfare, where there were too many passing cars and few pedestrians. A cat-tree about 30–40 centimeters high had been planted by the sidewalk. Sometimes I catch sight of a cat-pillar [ nekobashira] that has just been planted and hasn't yet become a cat-tree…Perhaps, I thought, it's better to turn dogs into dog-pillars. Dogs become vicious and harm people when there's no food. But why did they have to turn cats into cat-pillars? Had the number of strays grown too large? Were they trying to improve the food situation just a bit? Or were they doing this to green the city [toshi o ryokka; ]?105 The narrator does not condemn the city for vegetizing its cats and dogs and even helps justify these actions: dogs become dangerous when hungry, so turning them into plants makes the city not only safer but greener. Motives for vegetizing humans are more explicit. Plants are easier to control than people, so the city turns into plants individuals who challenge authority. The narrator gives several examples: a postal worker whose boss overheard him complaining about his salary; the narrator's own wife, who at a meeting of housewives complained

that prices were too high, criticized the government, and was subsequently informed on by another woman attending the gathering; and, alluding to the protests that take place outside the Diet building in Tokyo, both a progressive critic and the students who protested his arrest and threatened violence at the Diet (kokkai e gebaruto o kakey to shita).106 The postal worker has been planted near the hospital between two “human trees” (nin no ki),107 the narrator's wife beside a hardware store, and the critic in the middle of the bustling Ginza, for the simple reason that he likes the countryside, has always lived there, and thus will have difficulty adjusting to the confinement of a metropolis. The narrator overhears a report that students will “be planted like rows of trees on both sides of Student Street, the street in front of their university.”108 “Standing Person” suggests that with so many people sentenced to life as human trees it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between trees that have always been plants and those that began life as people. Tsutsui's short story most obviously exposes and critiques oppressive social systems, however seemingly benign, particularly the ease with which they figuratively vegetize their populations and the frequent complaisance of their Page 326 →residents. The postal worker reveals just how readily people succumb to their new position: “You don't feel all that much,” he [said] with no expression on his face. Everyone who becomes a human pillar becomes expressionless. “Even I think I've become considerably plantlike [ shokubutsuteki] not only in how I feel but also in how I think. At first I was angry, and sad, but now it doesn't matter. I used to get really hungry, but they say that vegetizing [ shokubutsuka] goes faster if you don't eat.” He said this while staring at me with his lightless eyes. He probably was hoping that he soon could become a human tree. “They say that those guys who have radical ideas are given a lobotomy before they are transformed into human pillars. [Even though that wasn't done to me,] about a month after being planted here not only did I no longer get angry, I also became for the most part completely indifferent to matters relating to human society. However one might put it, I was just an onlooker [ bkansha].”109 People might not actively desire to become vegetation, as they do in other fiction—including the Korean writer Han Kang's story “Nae yja i ylmae” (The Fruits of My Woman, 2000)—but they do not actively resist.110 Significantly, most human pillars, uncomfortable with being only semiconscious, long not to regain consciousness but instead to become human trees, to have their hearts “completely sink into the quiet world of plants.”111 And watching this happen to others makes even those who are not officially targeted believe themselves pillars, bled dry of feeling and passion and no longer capable of resisting injustice. The narrator concludes the story: “As I left the coffee shop and headed home, I realized that I had the feeling that I already had been made into a human pillar [; hitobashira]…‘I am the road's human pillar. You too are a human pillar. In any event, the two of us, in this world.’”112 “Standing Person” describes an authoritarian leader's dream: contrarian voices silenced, emotions eradicated, nothing but indifference from once censorious individuals, even perhaps those who have not been literally vegetized. But Tsutsui's story does more than parody Japan's social management; the transformation of people and animals into vegetation is not simply a metaphor for society's tapping into an inherent human desire for calm by silencing individuals believed to represent threats to the status quo. Touching on the absence of “natural” plant life in the city, on the great value placed by its residents on even the smallest parks and clusters of trees, discourse Page 327 → in “Standing Person” highlights human reconfiguration not simply of other people but also of physical spaces and their nonhuman populations. This dystopian narrative depicts a radical method of remediating decimated tree populations—after all, had the city not wanted the inconvenience of planting trees, officials could simply have imported synthetic greenery, as they are depicted doing in other creative work on damaged environments.113 Had they done so, there would have been no need for fertilizer trucks, nor would there be any risk of plants starving to death. In featuring such an extreme system, one that greatly exaggerates circumstances in Japan, Tsutsui's story points to the irrationality with which societies often face potential, perceived, or actual disruption, regardless of whether this disruption stems from a surplus of people or a dearth of flora. Much literature that addresses human damage of ecosystems portrays conflicts between people's behaviors and environmental conditions. Most striking are creative works that depict human beings who accept and at times

encourage ecodegradation, even when it harms them and their loved ones. Many of the texts discussed in this chapter parody how people behave when confronted with damaged environments, particularly their tendency to procrastinate, to grapple with problems only when they become too large to ignore, to assume that the nonhuman exists for human benefit, and to approve remediation only if it does not in any way adversely affect human lives. Literature points to the near inevitability of such reactions. This sobering fiction and poetry invite us not only to ponder the complex motivations behind such behaviors and their frequently ambiguous implications but also to think more deeply about the long-term consequences of interacting with environments in this way. While such creative texts highlight behaviors that at best maintain the status quo and at worse destroy landscapes, the next chapter discusses others that draw attention to our tendency to believe that our interactions with environments are as they should be, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

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SIX / Illusions and Delusions Some of literature's most incisive commentaries on human abuse of the nonhuman arise in texts that appear to have very little to do with ecodegradation. Writings such as Bai Xianyong's “Anlexiang de yi ri” (A Day in Pleasantville, 1964), for instance, would not seem to hold much of interest to the ecocritic. This short story describes the oppressive uniformity of American suburbia and the challenges faced by an immigrant Chinese housewife thrust into such a milieu. But conformity, this story suggests, harms animals, plants, and the abiotic nonhuman as much as it does people. Conformity also creates the illusion of environmental well-being: people in Pleasantville, as elsewhere, physically or discursively enhance the appearance of the natural world to give the impression of environmental health and in so doing both damage and mask damage to ecosystems. This chapter analyzes literary engagement with these and other conflicts between perceptions/outward appearances and actual environmental conditions, discussing creative texts where human perceptions, the nonhuman, or both are manipulated to enable people to disavow ecodegradation, especially its severity but at times its mere existence. “A Day in Pleasantville” draws on Bai Xianyong's own experiences as an expatriate writer to address both the conceptual and the physical maneuvers that can lead to delusions of human and nonhuman well-being.1 This story takes place in the wealthy New York suburb of Pleasantville, a village in the town of Mount Pleasant, New York and a place of hermetically sealed air-conditioned houses not unlike the refrigerators of Ch’oe Sngho's “In the Refrigerated City,” discussed below.2 The narrative centers on Yiping, her husband Weicheng, and their eightyear-old daughter Baoli, a young Chinese immigrant family living on one of the town's elegant culs-de-sac. Like many of the suburb's middle-aged men, Weicheng works in New York City, where he is a successful stockbroker. In stark contrast with his wife, he has become thoroughly Americanized (yiqie de xisu dou caiqu le meiguo fangshi) and even speaks English with his daughter. Born and raised in the United States, Baoli considers herself American, a belief that deeply upsets her mother. As the only Chinese woman in an otherwise seemingly homogeneous town, Yiping Page 329 →insists that her daughter too is Chinese; the story concludes with a strident argument between mother and daughter and Weicheng chastising his wife for demanding Baoli conform to her expectations: “I want Baoli always to keep firmly in mind that she is Chinese. Baoli, listen, say this with me: ‘I am Chinese.’” “No! I am not Chinese!” Baoli's feet were both kicking and her distorted body was struggling desperately. Yiping's face turned pale, and with trembling voice she sternly shouted: “You must say this with me: ‘I—am—a—Chin—ese’” []. “I am not Chinese! I am not Chinese!” Baoli's screams grew stronger. Yiping let go of one hand and fiercely slapped Baoli's face… [Weicheng said] “We have to educate our child, but not like this. Baoli's only eight. How can she understand the distinction between Americans and Chinese? In school all her classmates are American. So of course she thinks she's also American. Rose [Yiping's English name], to tell the truth, Baoli was born in the United States. She is being raised in the United States, and after she grows up all her habits will be American. The more she can adapt to her environment [neng shiying huanjing], the happier she’ll be. You're afraid of her becoming an American because you don't want to become an American, but this is your own anxiety. It's not fair to transmit this to your child. Certainly you want Baoli to grow up to be a person who is psychologically sound, who can adapt to her environment [neng shiying huanjing], right?!3 Weicheng equates being psychologically sound (xinli jianquan; lit. mentally in perfect health) with the ability to adapt to one's environment, a phrase repeated twice in the passage cited above; most likely thinking of his own situation, he believes that the more his daughter can adapt to her seemingly homogenous environment, the happier

she will be (ta yu neng shiying huanjing, ta jiu yu kuaile). Highlighting both the prevalence and the importance of conformity/uniformity, “A Day in Pleasantville” wraps up several lines later with Yiping swallowing a tranquilizer and drifting off to sleep to the sounds of the television: “Sounds began to come out of the television—what began was once again that Winston cigarette commercial that every day sang without ceasing: ‘Winston tastes good, / Like a cigarette should!’”4 With these sounds another day in Pleasantville comes to an end, a day like any other. The narrator's language emphasizes the commercial's repetition and consistency Page 330 →—Winston (lit. what began was again the Winston cigarette commercial that every day every day all sang without stopping). For its part, the famous albeit ungrammatical and controversial slogan “Winston tastes good, / Like a cigarette should!”—transcribed in English in Bai Xianyong's Chinese-language story—points to the importance of reliability; even cigarettes conform to expectations. To be sure, “A Day in Pleasantville” suggests that there is much Yiping could do to adapt actively to life in the suburbs and attempt to make it more bearable: learning how to drive would give her greater freedom, spending time in New York would allow her to reconnect with the friends she left behind when the family moved to Pleasantville, taking English lessons would enable her to communicate more easily with her neighbors and participate in more of their pastimes, and acquiring new skills would help her find a job that might link her with people who have similar interests. But Bai Xianyong's narrative also points to the real pressures placed on immigrants to the United States, particularly women, to conform to American expectations both by “Americanizing” (i.e., engaging in activities such as bridge and Sunday church services that are of little interest to them but often are de rigueur for their neighbors) and by confirming every stereotype Americans have of their homelands, in this case China. The narrator describes housewives in Pleasantville as welcoming Yiping not as one of them but instead as a curiosity, an individual whom they treat as a “rare visitor” (xike) even though she is a resident of the town and her daughter attends school with their children. Not only do these women feign interest in everything Chinese, they also make a point of explaining to her every nuance of American life, as if they were her tour guides and she knew nothing of their town. This not surprisingly makes Yiping even more aware of her Chinese heritage and leads her to dress and act more “Chinese” than she would otherwise: [Being treated this way] made Yiping even more conscious that she was Chinese and that she was different from the crowd. Thus she became even more careful, often subconsciously carrying herself in a way that emphasized her Chinese features. At every get-together Yiping wore long Chinese gowns, hung a smile from her face, spoke in a gentle voice, and answered the same questions from those wives again and again…Yiping had to exert considerable effort to put on the appearance of a Chinese.5 In short, unlike some immigrants, who believe they need to become more American than Americans, Yiping must become more Chinese than the Chinese. Page 331 → So too must this town's trees and lawns become greener and lusher than greenery. In the opening paragraphs of “A Day in Pleasantville” the narrator describes the vegetation surrounding the town's perfectly symmetrical homes, underscoring the importance residents put on consistency and highlighting the difficulties that face anyone not capable of immediate conformity. Not only people but also plants growing on suburban properties are manipulated to become at once “less” and “more” of their former selves. The narrator emphasizes that the phenomena he describes are not unique to this one New York suburb: Pleasantville is just like any of America's thousands upon thousands of big-city suburbs. The town was built according to an architect's plans, utterly tidy [shifen zhengqi]. The air is clear [qingche], the streets, the houses, the trees, all are especially clean [fenwai de qingjie]. There's no dust [meiyou huichen]. There's no soot [meiyou meiyan]…Woods and lawns have been planted on both sides of every street. The leaves are extraordinarily green and lush [lüwo de chuqi], probably because the soil went through a good chemical fertilizing [lianghao de huaxue shifei]. The leaves are all so shiny, plump, and swollen that they resemble the waxy green artificial potted landscapes sold by decorating

stores. And the lawns go through so many repairs, trimmed everywhere, laboriously manicured, all to the same height, and of the same style, as though everyone had spread a green plastic carpet they’d brought home from Macy's department store [ Macy's,].6

The trees that line the streets of Pleasantville appear in the best of health precisely because they are not. They have been doused with chemicals, so much so that they look nearly identical to the waxy artificial potted greenery sold by decorators. Lawns likewise have been so meticulously groomed that homeowners might as well have covered their properties with green plastic carpets. This passage most obviously lampoons the conformity required in American suburbia. Yet even as it ridicules the extremes to which people go to follow a suburban ideal, “A Day in Pleasantville” reveals more. Its discourse on woods and lawns forced to become greener than green, to become both more and less of themselves to give the appearance of ecological health, captures the immigrant experience for individuals like Yiping. But it also points to one of the major outcomes of reshaping landscapes: the harm to lawns and trees themselves and to the spaces affected by chemical runoff. The narrator Page 332 →notes that in the winter, “It looks as though everyone in town has gathered up the green carpet [lü de tan] from in front of their houses. The grassy hillsides expose dry yellow land [luchu le jiaohuang de tudi; ].”7 Repeating the analogy of suburban lawns to green carpets that can be rolled and unrolled at will, the narrator reveals what hides beneath this cover: “dry yellow land.” It is not unusual for grass in suburban New York to turn yellow-brown in winter, particularly in years of little precipitation. But the reference to the land, as opposed to the grass as being this color, suggests that something more could be at stake. The “good chemical fertilizing” to which lawns were subjected during spring and summer appears to have damaged the earth. Although the phrase jiaohuang de tudi is more commonly translated “sallow land” (rather than “dry yellow land,” as above), the character jiao means scorch, and the compound jiaotu scorched earth, as in the scorched earth policy of wartime, where land and property are intentionally destroyed in anticipation of invasion. “A Day in Pleasantville” of course nowhere suggests that this is what people have done to their town, and residents clearly have not intended to damage their properties, but the story does strongly imply that chemicals have singed the landscape. Of course the more yellow the soil, the more vigorously homeowners, addicted to artificial green, will apply chemicals the following year, something that will only exacerbate environmental damage. The narrator's description of the road outside Yiping and Weicheng's home also suggests that the terms “clear” (qingche) and “clean” (qingjie), at least to describe the ecosystems of Pleasantville, are relative at best and likely mere illusions. Alternatively, showing the mutability of perceptions, the description suggests that if these terms do describe the town's environments, they are not characteristics to be celebrated. After noting that the family's street is a dead-end road connecting their small hill with the highway leading to New York, the narrator comments, “This is a quiet, asphalted street, exceptionally broad and clean [qingjie], pale gray, likely resembling a river course that's on the verge of drying up [kujie de hedao], the gray of boundless river water that has completely stagnated [wanquan zhizhu].”8 Two sentences later the narrator compares the sound of a car door shutting to the plop of a rock thrown into this “dead water” (sishui). Since everything in Pleasantville is supposedly identical, the road on which Yiping and her family live is presumably no more stagnant or dead than other streets in town. Just as hillside lawns yellowing in winter are not unusual, so too pale gray roads are common; black asphalt lightens from frost and salt spread to melt ice and snow. On the other hand, several lines after describing the road, the narrator comments that the town is still a few days from the first snow of the Page 333 →season; the fact that the roads are already pale gray suggests that something might be amiss. Moreover, just as “dry yellow land” signals actual damage, not simply a seasonal change of color, so too the comparison of the street first to a nearly parched riverbed, then more significantly to a stagnant river, and finally to dead water implies environmental harm. The road's slope makes this comparison particularly noteworthy; the river is so sluggish, the narrator implies, that it even defies gravity. Most people believe the streets are as clean and aseptic as they are broad and quiet. But the road surface could also be stained with chemical fertilizers that have overflowed from neighboring lawns. The fact that the narrator does not speak of these processes directly, instead comparing the street to a river, something it resembles in appearance but not in physical properties, is a reminder of the ambiguities involved in actually identifying environmental damage.

Perhaps the most powerful indicator that environments are not as they seem is the putative silence that envelops the town. The narrator comments that the hill where Yiping and Weicheng live “has its own unique quiet” (dute de jijing): “You can't hear the sound of the wind. You can't hear human voices. It's only once an hour or half hour that there's the deafening sound of a car door closing…[This] stirs up a momentary echo, but soon afterward, boundless, limitless deathly stillness [wu bian wu lang de siji] returns.”9 This stillness is described as “unique” (dute), but chances are that it in fact is widespread. The town's residents spend most of their time inside climatecontrolled spaces, so it is not surprising that few human voices are audible outdoors. But what about animals? The phrase “deathly stillness” (siji), although a figure of speech, bodes poorly for other species. In fact, “A Day in Pleasantville” contains not a single reference to an animal—a noteworthy absence for a suburban town of broad lawns and woods, where one would expect to find at least birds, squirrels, rabbits, deer, and the occasional red fox. Yiping and Weicheng's house is on White Pigeon Hill (Baigepo), but birds appear to live here in name only. On the other hand, perhaps no animals are heard not because there are none but because their voices are obscured by the noise of vehicular traffic. Even more significant than the absence of animal sounds is the presence of those created by people. As one might expect on a hill directly above a well-traveled freeway, likely the Saw Mill River Parkway, the soundscape is not as blank as initially claimed. Almost immediately after mentioning the neighborhood's “distinctive quiet” and “deathly stillness,” the narrator acknowledges the white noise of vehicles racing on the highway below: “The sound of rubber tires sharply rubbing against the paved road. This goes on twenty-four hours a day, day and night, these sorts of wheels driving at Page 334 →high speeds, never letting up, never varying. This kind of monotonous, ear-piercing sound [cier de shengyin] long ago became one part of the quiet of White Pigeon Hill [Baigepo jingji de yi bufen le].”10 The sentences translated above repeatedly alert the reader to the incessant noise pollution, first mentioning that the sounds continue around the clock (ersi xiaoshi), then that they make no distinction between day and night (bufen zhouye), that they never stop (meiyou zhongduan), that they never change (meiyou bianhua), and that they are monotonous (dandiao). But the final sentence translated above says it all. Sounds are not just audible, but ear-piercing (cier), yet their monotony paradoxically renders them a part of the neighborhood's “quiet” (jingji). Residents have deluded themselves into believing their town is silent despite its being anything but. Seemingly the only person aware of the noise is Yicheng, who hearing the roar of the highway below is often reminded that there is more to life than Pleasantville, that not everyone remains sequestered like herself. But she too appears paralyzed. “A Day in Pleasantville” propagates multiple stereotypes about American suburbia circa 1960, particularly the conformity, indeed monotony, of culture, behavior, and the built environment. Bai Xianyong's short story is particularly concerned with the challenges faced by immigrant housewives living in such places. Unlike many narratives on American suburbia, the story does not discuss the troubles of Pleasantville's American housewives, instead portraying these women as a happy homogeneous group, in sharp contrast with Yiping. But the text also addresses the paradoxical condition of the nonhuman environment. It is hardly as green, clean, and quiet as it appears. The narrative lures the reader into its own seeming uniformity, initially giving the impression that descriptions of physical landscapes serve merely as backdrop for the town's monotony. Yet when examined more closely, these references reveal far more complicated developments, most importantly the seduction of sameness in concealing empirical conditions. “A Day in Pleasantville” demonstrates the ease with which the damage to bodies and bodyscapes— people, lawns, woods, roads, and soundscapes—can be disguised by their seeming uniformity. As Bai Xianyong's story suggests, conflicts between people's perceptions and environmental conditions are inevitable, the more so because societies are reluctant to align their beliefs with available evidence. Tenacious illusions and delusions make it difficult to change perceptions, particularly in the face of disagreeable information. Many forms of discourse on ecological damage take up conflicts between people's beliefs and environmental realities. At times, crisis is declared imminent without supporting data, but far more frequently ecodegradation and the significance of this damage are downplayed Page 335 →or even denied despite evidence to the contrary.11 Like “A Day in Pleasantville” yet addressing environmental concerns more explicitly, some texts highlight the human proclivity to manipulate the nonhuman to create the impression of environmental health or at least minimal damage to ecosystems. The most forceful literary exposés of conflicts between perceptions and actualities are

poems that dramatically stress the chasms between people's beliefs and the actual condition of environments. Other texts emphasize the indifference of those who actually damage environments toward the consequences of their behaviors. Finally, some literary works that examine the abyss between perceptions and actualities of environmental degradation highlight the tenacious fallacy that the nonhuman can sustain even the most excessive human behaviors in the names of culture and civilization. Together, the creative texts analyzed in this chapter reveal a broad spectrum of artistic negotiations with illusion and delusion as they concern environmental conditions. By emphasizing how texts and characters (un)consciously downplay the severity of ecodegradation, this poetry and prose show literature's engagement with the human tendency to minimize what has been done to environments.

Physically and Conceptually Manipulating Environments Many creative works addressing environmental degradation—including the Korean writer Kim Kwanggyu's prose poem “Hwae namu” (Pagoda Tree, 1986) and the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's poem “Naenggak doen tosi e s” (In the Refrigerated City, 1991)—show how readily perceptions can be manipulated to downplay damage to the nonhuman. Kim Kwanggyu's text explores why people deny change, while Ch’oe Sngho's points to the disjuncture between the desired, consumable appearance of nonhuman bodies and the effects of this appearance on these bodies and on ecosystems more generally. In contrast, other creative works depict a vibrant nonhuman as paradoxically having the potential to propagate suffering. These include the Japanese writers Isakawa Masaomi's poem “Kosumosu no hana” (Cosmos Flower, 1970s) and Nakaoka Jun’ichi's poem “Midori ga shitatari” (Green Trickles, 2000s), both of which appear in Nagatsu Kzabur's anthology Atomic Bomb Poetry.12 The first-person narrator of Kim Kwanggyu's prose poem “Pagoda Tree,” which like Bai Xianyong's “A Day in Pleasantville” is not an obvious choice for the ecocritic, describes a pagoda tree (Chinese scholar tree) that has for decades shaded people and their artifacts.13 On the one hand, this brief poem highlights the tree's resilience, surviving a war and numerous changes to the Page 336 →built environment. On the other hand, “Pagoda Tree” indicates how easily perceptions can be misguided and suggests that although the tree appears to have escaped unharmed, its vigor might be an illusion. Explicitly said to have survived the Korean War, this tree is clearly in Korea. Yet nothing else about it makes it a “Korean” tree; its experiences are like those of much other flora that survive wars and other serious human encroachments. As in many creative texts on damaged environments, local history is important; published in the mid-1980s, “Pagoda Tree” in some ways reflects Korea's awakening environmental consciousness. But with just a single reference to “Korea” in the form of “6·25 ttae” (lit. the occasion of June 25 [1950]; the day North Korean forces invaded South Korea), the poem does not dwell on its Koreanness and instead focuses on the relationship between a person and a tree. “Pagoda Tree” is divided into three sections of two paragraphs each. The tree is introduced in the opening sentence/paragraph as the place where “every evening the owls came to howl.”14 It has provided shade for decades, all while supposedly not changing in the slightest. The narrator remarks, “The pagoda tree cast a broad shadow over the well. The well's bucket went missing, and a pump took shape, and then public waterworks took over, and some time ago a gas station came into being in that space, but even today the pagoda tree remains standing there, unchanged [pynham psi k chari e s itta].”15 Animals seem to have disappeared, the poem's first paragraph stating that this is a place owls “came to howl”; bodies of water have changed shape and consistency as technology moved from buckets to pumps to public waterworks; a gas station now stands nearby. Names have also changed, the first sentence stating that people living near the tree “used to call it” a pagoda tree. This does not preclude people continuing to call this a pagoda tree, as the narrator does himself, or owls continuing to hoot, but it does suggest that these things are probably part of the past. The second section of Kim Kwanggyu's prose poem elaborates on the tree's endurance. During the Korean War the tree shaded the remains of a bombed and abandoned army truck; the soil eventually absorbed the rusting metal that scrap dealers deemed worthless until the entire vehicle “finally was dismantled and faded out of sight.”16 As before, the tree appears entirely unaffected by what happens around it. The narrator then admits that several shards became imbedded in its bark but claims that this iron rusted and was consumed by the tree's sap. Soon the only indications that the tree suffered human-induced damage were gnarls on its surface, warts that easily could be attributed to normal aging. Ironically the most noticeable difference is the “nature protection notice board” (chayn

poho p’aenmal) that has recently been attached to its trunk. Page 337 → Every time the narrator looks at this tree he feels its magnetism and longs to stroke it, lean against it, climb it, and sometimes even become its roots and branches. On the other hand, whether he hurries by on foot or in a vehicle, he feels ashamed. This is because “The thought that the body in motion was that very pagoda tree, and that the body standing in a single spot for years was in reality I myself comes repeatedly to mind.”17 A large part of his discomfort likely stems from feeling that his life is going nowhere and realizing that even something as rooted as a tree in fact is always moving, always changing. As revealing as this passage is of the narrator's insecurities about his life, it is even more illuminating of his perceptions of the pagoda tree and the nonhuman more generally. The narrator appears to need the tree to remain unvarying, or at least to convince himself that it is unvarying, so that his own stagnancy will be better camouflaged. His efforts to paint the tree in this manner are an important part of this endeavor, but like any declaration of extremes, they are easily discredited. One can imagine a tree, assuming it is not situated on a battlefield, making it through a war with only minor and easily disguised injuries. Yet the only type of tree that could remain completely “unchanged” in even the most inert environment would be artificial, akin to the plastic greenery featured in Bai Xianyong's “A Day in Pleasantville.” And even these replicas can be altered by pollutants and other air particles, albeit often more subtly than their live counterparts.18 Interestingly, the narrator is not ashamed at making such statements, only at the thought that foliage is in motion while he stands still. “Pagoda Tree” shows how assessments of nonhuman permanence both cloak human changes to environments and divert attention from personal insecurities. Uniformity is replaced in Ch’oe Sngho's poem “In the Refrigerated City” by the anonymity of a supermarket in an undisclosed location.19 Recounted in the first person, “In the Refrigerated City” discusses dead and dying marine animals in both the ocean and the store; it brings out the misunderstandings of human impacts on environments that can result from the sight of diced, processed, and anonymous cuts of meat. The opening stanza contrasts water made bloody from harpooned whales with store displays of packaged, labeled, and refrigerated whale meat: A summer day, when blood spouts into the sea from whales pierced and overturned by the harpoons of whaling ships when supermarket doors open goods in refrigerated air currents Page 338 → there are surveillance cameras above my head surveillance mirrors reflect me here and there20 Although easily visible to whalers and sea animals, the gruesome ocean scene the poem describes—not ascribed to whaling ships of any particular nationality—is hidden from most people.21 Whale meat is sanitized for visual and gastronomic consumption, landing in supermarket refrigerators looking nothing like whales, living or slaughtered. Security equipment records every move shoppers make, but society obscures the legal, economic, and physical processes that enable some of the world's largest mammals to be transformed into anonymous slabs of flesh. Few people stop to think about the origins of this meat and how it arrived in their stores. The third and final stanza of “In the Refrigerated City” describes the shopping experience in more detail: A summer day, when the city's supermarket— where women with shopping baskets

crane their necks, roaming between goods and labels – travels like a merchant ship, in the noise and sun. These lines depict the supermarket as a place of commodities to be deposited in baskets, a place where a person can peacefully wander about, miles from sites of carnage. To highlight this difference, the poem likens the supermarket to a merchant ship, not to a whaling vessel; the former generally carries goods made more presentable for sale, not freshly killed animals. Ch’oe Sngho's poem can be read as a statement against whaling, but it is an especially pungent comment on the disparities between living animals on the one hand and their deaths and reconfiguration for store shelves on the other. “In the Refrigerated City” begins with whales but quickly broadens to include other animals. The first stanza concludes with two lines on crustaceans that suggest these animals just might be spared the fate of their larger marine counterparts. Whereas whales are spouting blood, crabs are spouting sea foam; whereas whales are harpooned, crabs are resisting, indicating that they might have somewhat more control over their lives. Yet the second stanza reveals that they are not in open water but confined in a bucket, facing a fate similar to that of the whales: and the small crabs that refuse to be ransomed swarm and spout sea foam Page 339 → The small crabs dying in a barrel Caught on camera, their deaths are available for human visual consumption; the crabs might first “refuse to be ransomed” (momkapsl kbuhada), a curious phrase suggesting agency, but they cannot thwart death. The demise of other animals is better disguised. Listing the contents of one of the store's refrigerators, Ch’oe Sngho's poem reveals animals placed among a variety of plant foods, all kept reasonably fresh by the machine's chilled air. Refrigerator currents are noiseless, a far cry from the din outside the case, much less the plaintive sounds almost certain to accompany deaths that occur outside the refrigerated city: curled onions swarms of silent anchovies spruced up leeks and crown daisies the refrigerated currents silently flow my consciousness touches the icy bones of the dead fish inside the refrigerator Unlike the swarms of crabs mentioned in the opening lines of the stanza, the anchovies have already been killed. Nearly frozen and therefore nearly odorless, they rest peacefully, waiting to be scooped up by customers. Most interesting is the speaker's comment that his consciousness touches the icy bones of these dead fish (na i isik n naengjanggo sok chugn mulgogi i / ch’agaun ppy e tak’o itta). He elaborates on this remark at the end of the third stanza, in the text's final lines: “Warm blood that begins in the bones / cosmic current of swirling blood.”22 It is not clear which bones are meant—his own, those of the fish in the supermarket's refrigerators, or both. The narrator could be suggesting that witnessing the transformation of sea animals into a form belying the traumas they have suffered has awakened within him deep emotions. Or he could be referring to the physiology of these

animals when they are alive. Either way, the reference to cosmic currents (ujuryu) recalls the circulating refrigerated air and bloodied water currents of earlier stanzas. The “swirling blood” (soyongdoli ch’inn p’i ) of the poem's final line echoes the “spouting blood” (p’ippum) of its second line. Swirling blood becomes spouting blood when these animals are killed; bloody water currents are replaced by chilled drafts. That Ch’oe Sngho's poem is titled “In the Refrigerated City,” not “In the Refrigerated Supermarket,” expands Page 340 →the spatial scope of the text. So too does the poem's speaking generally about a “city,” rather than identifying one particular urban space. These strategies encourage awareness of the greater attention people are likely to pay to the refrigeration (preservation) of pieces of animals than to preserving the animals themselves in their original habitats. They likewise highlight the human proclivity to think less about the slaughter of animals than their processing and packaging. Describing how the sight of icy bones in a refrigerator makes the speaker think of warm and swirling, not warm and spouting blood, the poem suggests that even when people stop to consider earlier incarnations of the animals inside their refrigerators, they imagine living animals, not carcasses. The more spaces become refrigerated, literally and figuratively, the more perceptions of animals and of human transformations of animals are altered and sanitized and the more illusions and delusions are propagated. Fortifying these insights, creative works such as Isakawa's “Cosmos Flower” and Nakaoka's “Green Trickles” expose some of the potential dangers of similar altered perspectives, even when they result from “natural” improvement or recovery of environments. “Cosmos Flower,” written in the 1970s, cites the sentiments of a Japanese school principal shortly after World War Two about the rapid restoration of certain nonhuman species; his surprise that nature is recovering so quickly echoes numerous voices in postwar Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately, however, the human and nonhuman recovery of the bombed city is linked to the failure to prevent the outbreak of war elsewhere: For ten years even grass won't grow at the epicenter of the blast Despite rumors like this already by autumn weeds had sprouted from the rubble In a corner of the desolate ruined school building I saw a cosmos flower… All right, [I thought], I've somehow got to rent a school building quickly and start up classes again… It's already been thirty years [since that speech] Hiroshima has been remarkably restored [mezamashiku fukk] but there always is a war going on, somewhere in the world. Yet every year cosmos flowers bloom everywhere.23 Witnessing nature coming to life a decade before he expected it would inspires the principal to resume educating the city's children. But the poem's final lines reveal the paradoxes and suggest potential unintended consequences Page 341 →of rapid recovery: thirty years after the blast, and in fact long before that, the city looked nearly “normal,” flowers bloomed around the world, but combat, far from eradicated, had simply changed venues.24 “Cosmos Flower” does more than lament the prevalence of war. It paradoxically suggests that if Hiroshima had remained a wasteland, future conflicts elsewhere on the planet might have been forestalled. Nakaoka's “Green Trickles” addresses this conundrum more directly. Reflecting the environmental cosmopolitanism so prominent in Atomic Bomb Poetry, this work criticizes the makeshift measures to control radioactive waste implemented at Chernobyl after its 1986 nuclear power-plant disaster. The poem then remarks:

“The dripping green of ‘Beautiful Japan’/ Completely conceals this danger-filled scene.”25 The “dripping green” (shitataru midori) of many landscapes, both physical and textual, conceals abuse and destruction of both people and the nonhuman. “Green Trickles” points out not only the global consequences of the explosions at Chernobyl but also global responsibility for these events and for the recovery of the region's ecosystems. Just as significant is the poem's evocation of “Beautiful Japan”; Nakaoka appropriates the term from the Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari's Nobel Prize acceptance speech “Utsukushii Nihon no watakushi” (Myself from Beautiful Japan, 1968), an eloquent celebration of Japanese aesthetics and Japanese appreciation of nature. He also echoes or at least anticipates the irony both of remarks by former Japanese Prime Minister Abé Shinz, on assuming office in 2006, about Japan's “beautiful natural environment”26 and of Sakai Izumi's recent poetry anthology Genbaku shish —hachigatsu (Collection of Atomic Bomb Poems—August, 2008), which juxtaposes poems on the horrors of the atomic bombings with color photographs of thriving landscapes.27 Nakaoka's poem reveals both the superficiality and hypocrisy and the potential lethality of rhetoric such as Kawabata's. Inherently ambiguous, “beauty,” particularly beauty evident after a disaster, often is a sign of rebirth. But regeneration of environments does not preclude future devastation of either people or the nonhuman. In fact, by giving a false sense of security, it easily can mask distressed areas and divert attention from preventing future damage, allowing for continued degradation of both humans and the natural world.

Gaping Chasms Literary works often intensify the dynamics of the texts analyzed in the previous section, taking illusions and delusions to an extreme. Some, such as the Japanese writer and environmental activist Sakaki Nanao's poem “Nabete Page 342 →yo wa koto mo nashi” (All's Right with the World, 1980), depict individuals who insist that everything is “all right” even when confronted with nearly apocalyptic conditions. Others, such as Sakaki's poem “Ee ja nai ka ee ja nai ka” (What the Hell What the Hell, 1987), do so by opening with a stereotype that the remainder of the text then deflates. Whether or not the scenarios they depict are realistic, by ridiculing false perceptions of ecohealth these texts suggest that such outlooks not only make environmental degradation easier to bear but also risk facilitating it. Sakaki's “All's Right with the World”—like the American writer Stephen Vincent Benét's much earlier “Metropolitan Nightmare” (1933)—exaggerates the human tendency to believe that nothing is amiss when in fact both people and their environments are disintegrating rapidly.28 This poem brings out the potential consequences of continuing to assert that all is well in the face of radically transforming ecosystems. “All's Right with the World” opens by adapting a well-known quotation from Robert Browning's drama Pippa Passes (1841): “Snails crossing roses / Larks rising high dancing in the skies / God's reigning in heaven / All's right with the world.”29 The situation described by the quotation—animals frolicking, leading the observer to think that a deity sits above and all is well—contrasts sharply with the one facing the individual featured in Sakaki's verse. “All's Right with the World” is divided into six two-stanza sections, one each for Monday through Saturday and a final one-stanza section for Sunday. In the first stanzas the poem's speaker reveals which parts of the nonhuman are missing from their customary spaces; in the second stanzas, he indicates what is on television that night, followed by the refrain: “God's reigning in heaven / All's right with the world” (kami ten ni shirashimesu / nabete yo wa koto mo nashi). Taking an ecologically cosmopolitan approach, the poem's speaker does not identify where he is located; the situation he describes could be anywhere there is television reception. Unlike many of Sakaki's poems, “All's Right with the World” does not conclude with a note on its date and place of publication. As its title suggests, this poem eventually encompasses the world; the Monday through Thursday sections report on the condition of an individual's property and that of his neighbor, but on Friday the speaker leaves his city and by Saturday he laments the loss of the planet itself. The first section focuses solely on human absences, both confirmed and suggested: Monday morning in my house no one

in the neighbor's house no one Page 343 → call the police phone rings for three minutes no answer Tonight's TV, “Frankenstein” God's reigning in heaven All's right with the world.30 Possibly the lack of people at his and his neighbor's houses is nothing out of the ordinary—it being Monday morning, they might simply be at work—but the speaker's call to the police indicates that he believes something is wrong. The unanswered phone in the station more ominously implies that the police are simply derelict, have been called away by an emergency, or perhaps even have disappeared. Despite these anomalies, the following stanza deems everything all right. The second through fifth sections of the poem follow a similar pattern. Each begins with the day of the week, followed by “morning.” In the following two to three lines the poem's speaker lists the parts of the nonhuman that now are missing. He then telephones the professionals who should be able to provide answers or at least begin investigating the absences. But he cannot reach anyone. The second stanza of each section is virtually identical, one television show simply replacing another, contrasting with the ever more serious absences noted in the first stanza of each section. On Tuesday not only are people missing, but dogs, cats, and mice are nowhere to be found, at least inside the speaker's dwelling; he calls the animal hospital, but receives no response. On Wednesday, absences have spread to the areas immediately outside his home and his neighbor's—insects, fish, and birds are all gone. On Thursday, nearby fields are bereft of flowers, vegetables, and trees. The speaker is clearly troubled by these losses; otherwise he would not be calling the animal hospital, the zoo, and the botanical garden. But still he proclaims that all is right with the world, presumably because television broadcasting blares on. The more these lines are repeated, the higher they build one atop the other, the more ridiculous they appear. Conditions become severe on Friday, when the speaker declares that mountains and rivers have disappeared from both his and neighboring towns. He telephones the central government but receives no answer. Regardless, he continues to assert that things are as they should be. By Saturday, even the planet has disappeared, yet he claims not to recognize the gravity of the situation: Saturday morning mother earth nowhere [hahanaru chiky sugata nashi] Page 344 → call the psychiatric hospital phone rings for three minutes no answer Tonight's TV, “Shogun” God's reigning in heaven All's right with the world.31 “All's Right with the World” then concludes:

Sunday morning God walks back to church Good morning good morning good morning ––no answer. Whereas Monday through Saturday are marked by absence, Sunday is characterized by presence, with God coming down from heaven. But God is alone on earth and has no more success contacting people than did the poem's speaker. Little here is “right.” Sakaki's text leaves many questions unanswered, including what has happened to everyone/everything. But even more disconcerting is why, despite being disturbed that so many familiar bodies have disappeared, the speaker continues to delude himself into thinking that nothing is wrong with the world. This is not a case of an individual simply not seeing what is happening around him or seeing what is happening but believing that conditions do not warrant further attention. That the speaker makes initial calls to report absences as they occur indicates his discomfort with what is transpiring. But his inability to follow through, to recognize the significance of these unexplained absences and change his perceptions of the condition of the world around him, points to real insecurities about his own future. His defensive optimism also prevents him from investigating more deeply the silences he confronts and instead leads him to rely on television for comfort. “All's Right with the World” clearly parodies the human proclivity to pretend that conditions are satisfactory, even as the planet collapses. In contrast with “All's Right with the World,” which satirizes the shibboleth “all's right” as it concerns environmental degradation, Sakaki's “What the Hell What the Hell” focuses on overturning stereotypes about a specific place. The title comes from the Japanese peasant uprisings of 1866–69, called both yonaoshi ikki (lit. world [yo]-fixing [naosu] revolts) and ee ja nai ka (lit. “why not?” or “anything goes”). These rebellions occurred in the midst of intense social and political deterioration, at a time when conventional values Page 345 →and meaning needed to be renegotiated.32 Sakaki's poem, written amid considerable environmental degradation, launches its own revolt against the status quo. But its title refers to the attitude many have concerning their relationships with the natural world. “What the Hell” topples the perception, articulated in the poem's opening line, that Japan is a country solely of beautiful scenery, alluring female bodies, and cutting-edge cultural products. It declares that the nation is rapidly destroying even its most precious natural resources, sometimes for the sake of tourism, sometimes for national defense, and sometimes for no particular reason. “What the Hell” also speaks of Japanese and American complicity in damaging each other's ecosystems. The sarcastic refrain “What the Hell” invites attention not only to Japanese and American nonchalance about abused environments but also to the absurdity of claims that Japan is “great,” at least in its treatment of the natural world.33 Written straightforwardly and incorporating a number of statistics, Sakaki's poem grounds itself in evidence while at the same time appealing to people's emotional responses to environments. “What the Hell” begins with stereotypes of Japan, followed immediately by lines that paint a very different picture: Cherry blossoms and geisha and computer country the quantity of its food superpower Japan produces 30 percent the quantity of grains imported equivalent to all of Africa the motive for 90 percent of Japanese to be middle class What the hell

What the hell34 Those unfamiliar and even many familiar with Japan often embrace stereotypes of the country as a place of flowers, female entertainers, and technology. Puncturing the expectations of the unsuspecting, the poem immediately exposes Japanese excess. It notes that Japan has lost the capacity or the willingness to produce enough food to sustain its own people. The following line—“the quantity of grains imported equivalent to all of Africa”—can be read to mean that Japan imports as much food as does all of Africa or that it imports as much food as Africa produces. Either way, Sakaki's poem points to Japanese gluttony in comparison with other countries and to its troubled relationships with the planet's resources more generally. Sakaki's poem declares Japan's objective to be ensuring comfortable lives for its citizens. The next stanzas reveal that to meet this goal, Japanese are destroying ecosystems throughout the archipelago and potentially even as Page 346 →far away as the United States. They are accused of cementing half of Japan's waterfront to ensure the deaths of the country's five remaining sea otters, destroying 90 percent of their coral reefs, and building thirteen nuclear power plants within a 200-kilometer radius of Kyoto. They also are hewing sacred woods in Nara to build a tourist parking lot, waiting for nuclear fallout from a research facility 140 kilometers north of Tokyo, and building an airbase deep in California's Yosemite National Park. Impending destruction awaits both the Shiraho coral reef (Ishigaki Island, Okinawa), which will be buried under a new airport handling larger tourist flights, something that Sakaki himself vocally opposed, and Miyake Island (part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, 180 kilometers south of Tokyo), which will become the site of a U.S. Navy airfield for night training.35 Seven of the nine stanzas describing this degradation conclude like the poem's first, chanting tauntingly “What the hell / What the hell.” Irony permeates Sakaki's poem: the text notes that predatory crown-of-thorns starfish assist Japan in destroying coral; that unlike contemporary Japanese, American bombers so revered Kyoto's and Nara's architecture and gardens that they spared the cities during World War Two; that Kyoto is “protected” (mamorareru) by thirteen “holy” (seinaru) nuclear power plants; that the U.S. Navy is building an airfield on Miyake Island to “praise the beauty of the divine volcano” (kgshii kazan no bi o tataete); and rather fantastically that Halley's Comet has just announced that Americans have asked the Japanese to construct an airbase in Yosemite National Park.36 The sarcasm of “What the Hell” is deadly serious. Some Japanese actions, such as cementing waterways, primarily affect sites within Japan, while others, such as destroying coral reefs, harm broad areas of nearby oceans. Even more disturbingly, the Japanese are depicted as damaging some of the world's most fragile, beautiful, and important ecosystems. Such behaviors reinforce the fact that the Japanese not only lack homegrown food but also are so desperate to be an entirely middle-class society that they plunder even their most precious landscapes. “What the Hell” reveals that behind Japan's pleasant facade is a nation headed toward self-destruction, its most important cities in danger of nuclear fallout, national parks threatened by foreign (U.S.) airbases, rivers polluted, animals dying, sacred groves felled, and coral reefs eroded. Yet despite everything, the poem suggests, people refuse to acknowledge this aspect of Japan, their perceptions diverging significantly from actual conditions. Texts such as Sakaki's “All's Right with the World” and “What the Hell” parody the human proclivity, even need, to believe that their interactions with environments are as they should be, in defiance of overt evidence to the Page 347 →contrary. These poems also highlight the flexibility and seductiveness of people's perceptions of environmental health, whatever the empirical evidence. Such outlooks rhetorically protect societies from having to face up to obviously damaged environments. Equally enticing are physical and conceptual alterations that shelter people from noticing these entities. The illusion that ecosystems are little harmed is based on appearances that mask actualities and sometimes worsen or even trigger degradation.

Signifying Indifference Texts that address how people harm the environment often feature conflicts between perceptions of ecohealth and evidence of ecodegradation. Expanding on these gulfs are contrasts between perceptions and actualities involving the delusion that behaviors are insignificant when they are anything but. While Sakaki's “All's Right with the World” simply claims everything to be “all right” when it is clearly not, the creative works examined in this section—the Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji's “Frandon Ngakk no buta” (The Frandon Agricultural School Pig,

1934), the Chinese writer A Cheng's short-short story “Zhouzhuan” (Turnover, 1988), and the Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi's short story “O–i dete ko–i” (He–y, Come on Ou–t, 1971)— offer more nuanced analyses of the indifference exhibited by those who actually damage particular animals and the natural world more generally. Miyazawa's story “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” (1934) highlights several common contradictions between how people regard their interactions with animals and the realities of these contacts. This short story by early twentieth-century Japan's most celebrated environmentally conscious writer in some ways prefigures the English author George Orwell's famously satiric novel Animal Farm (1945), written to destroy “the Soviet myth” and inspired by Orwell's recognition that “men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”37 While in Orwell's text animals successfully overthrow their human oppressors, the pig in Miyazawa's story is abused and killed by people, never having been granted such agency.38 Narrated by an individual who transcribes the thoughts and emotions of a Yorkshire pig being prepared for slaughter at the Frandon Agricultural School in addition to describing the behaviors of both the pig and its handlers, this text features people who believe they treat animals admirably when in fact they abuse them, who believe that animals owe their lives to people, and most important who believe that killing animals is of no consequence. Describing in detail the psychology of an articulate, terrified hog while remaining Page 348 →nearly silent about the thoughts of the people who interact with this animal, “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” provokes compassion for a suffering creature and urges readers to acknowledge that nonhuman perspectives exist and to take them seriously. Miyazawa's story relies on sympathetic human perceptions (the narrator's) of animal experience even as it critiques callous perceptions (those of the school's employees and students). In so doing it also reveals the possibilities and the limitations of human narratives in hypothesizing and transcribing the full range of animal experience, both consciousness and observed behavior. Setting the story in an undisclosed location, very likely outside Japan (especially considering the name of the agricultural school), allows the narrator to address more directly human, as opposed to Japanese, mistreatment of animals.39 Indeed, the narrator speaks of pigs as conversing in “human language” (ningengo), rather than in any single national tongue.40 “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” opens with a pig peacefully reflecting on its life and thanking the heavens for all of the happiness it has enjoyed.41 When a group of students declares pigs the organic equivalent of platinum, the animal immediately calculates that, given its weight and current commodity prices, its body is worth about 600,000 yen. It is delighted by this, but its joy is fleeting; several days later it learns that it has been marked for slaughter. The remainder of Miyazawa's story narrates the thoughts and experiences of the pig before its death, with which the text concludes. Because the animal begins losing weight and refuses to sign the Certificate of Consent, it is force-fed, whipped, and otherwise abused by its human handlers until it reaches the shape they desire, at which point it is beaten to death with a sledgehammer, sliced into eight pieces, and buried in the snow.42 Throughout this story the pig is depicted as very well spoken and educated by human standards. Not only are its math skills superb, it is a devoted student of language: “The pig possessed quite advanced linguistic skills [gogaku mo yohodo susunde ita]. Moreover, because its tongue was soft and it had a natural aptitude for speech [soshitsu mo jbun atta], it could speak fluent humanese [rych na ningengo].”43 The pig is also revealed as having a rich emotional life; because a large portion of Miyazawa's story takes place within the animal's mind, the reader is granted a privileged view of its thoughts and feelings as it resists, then readies itself for death. Near the conclusion of the text the narrator remarks, “It seemed as though the cold was stabbing through the pig…Its eyes were closed, and its head was really ringing. Various dreadful memories from the Yorkshire pig's entire life went through its mind, lighting up and going out like a revolving garden lantern. Page 349 →It heard various frightening noises.”44 Told in large part from the pig's imagined point of view, the narrative underscores the depths of the animal's suffering. Even more significant, the story exposes the disconnect between actual human treatment of the nonhuman and people's perceptions of this treatment. Trying to convince the pig to sign the Certificate of Consent, the principal of the Frandon Agricultural School asserts that his school treats animals more humanely than does any other facility: “Your friends are scattered around, and I’m well aware of this, and it might sound ridiculous, but there is no place that treats animals better than our school.”45 Here the principal attempts to forestall accusations that perceptions are inconsistent with reality, but the pig, rendered speechless, is not persuaded. It is true that until it

was marked for slaughter the animal appeared to lead a comfortable life, yet this comfort was always provisional. Another key instance of dissonance between people's treatment of the nonhuman and their perceptions of this treatment occurs later in the story, when a lower-ranking employee of the school claims that the pig has nothing to do with the existence of its own body. Attempting to persuade the animal to sign the Certificate of Consent, he commands it to stop thinking solely of itself, since “Your entire body exists thanks to the efforts of everyone at this school [sono karada wa zentai minna, gakk no okage de dekita].”46 This being the case, the pig's body not only belongs to those who feed and house it (as is true of most livestock) but also is believed to exist solely because of them. There is some truth to the claim that the school both owns the pig (in accordance with local laws) and is entirely responsible for the shape of its body, but the latter is accurate only after school employees begin forcing food down its throat, something the narrator graphically depicts.47 Featuring such an intelligent, articulate, emotional pig, Miyazawa's story deeply challenges the notion that animals should be grateful to people for their mere existence. Aspects of animals’ bodily health and form, especially weight, often correspond precisely to the way they have been treated by people, and human behaviors can prove lethal, whether by killing animals directly or by reducing their ability to produce offspring. Even their conception is often arranged by people; livestock are among the most controlled of animals, monitored as they are from birth to death. But “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” suggests that this does not mean that as they grow, their bodies are entirely human creations for people to do with as they please. The most significant ambiguity in Miyazawa's narrative is the incongruity between perception and actuality: on the one hand, the school's assumptions that asking the pig for permission to kill it is routine and abusing and Page 350 →killing the pig are to be taken lightly, and on the other hand the reality of what these behaviors do to the animal. In his conversations with the pig, the principal repeatedly refers to the latter's signing the Certificate of Consent as a “very small request” (hon no chiisa na tanomi da) and a “truly trivial matter” (taishita koto mo nakatta).48 After all, he argues, no organism can escape death. The pig, however, recognizes the difference between dying at an unspecified time in the future and being killed; overwhelmed by its perilous situation, it refuses to provide its hoofprint. It is depicted as an astute reader of human motives and texts, a being all too aware of what is happening to it: “The pig knitted its eyebrows, and for a short time looked fixedly at the document with which it had been confronted. If things were as the principal had said, then it was nothing, but when it read carefully the words of the document, it realized that what he was proposing was totally dreadful…In tears, the pig screamed, ‘I won't do it, I won't do it, I won't do it. I simply won't do it [iya desu, iya desu, sonnara iya desu. D shitemo iya desu].’”49 Unswayed by his handler's claims, the pig is all too conscious of the gravity of the principal's request. Shortly thereafter an employee assigned to force the pig into submission begins whipping the animal while himself pacing nonchalantly and whistling the wartime British marching song “It's a Long Way to Tipperary.” The pig is disturbed by this display of indifference: The whip came down on its back with a snap, and the pain was intolerable. The Yorkshire pig could do nothing but flop out of the shed, but its heart was filled with sadness and as it walked its heart felt as though it were being ripped apart. As for the assistant, he walked casually behind the pig whistling Tipperary. The whip swung, dangling by his side. How can he sing Tipperary when I’m so full of sadness, wondered the pig while twisting its mouth… (This life is truly so difficult, so difficult, it's truly a world of suffering and hardship.) The pig reflected on this carefully while walking along and being beaten… [The assistant left] smiling and whistling Tipperary. The window had been left wide open, so the pig suffered from unbearable cold.50 Impersonating an Irishman in London longing for home, an individual who several times declares that despite the distance “my heart's right there [at home],” “It's a Long Way to Tipperary” is an especially cruel tune to whistle to

a pig destined for slaughter. The Irishman yearns for his land and his love, Page 351 →but he can repeat with confidence “Goodbye, Piccadilly, / Farewell, Leicester Square,” knowing that chances are great he will eventually return home. The pig, ever contemplative, cannot understand how the employee can be so heartless as to whistle this tune blithely in its presence. The succeeding pages of “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” elaborate on the physical and emotional abuse to which this intelligent animal has been subjected. People are under the illusion that what they are doing to the pig matters little. Because its body is not human, it is seen as hardly more than a piece of merchandise, and the employees of the agricultural school estimate its value.51 By transcribing the pig's anguished thoughts, Miyazawa's story most obviously attempts to increase sympathy for the animal. If the reader is willing to suspend disbelief, this story for the most part is convincing. Today's technology allows people to understand only a minuscule fraction of nonhuman languages; people have virtually no access into one another's minds, much less into those of animals. Anthropomorphizing often plays down the traumas animals face, but in Miyazawa's story it explicitly accentuates their pain. This stems from the similarities between the pig's thoughts and those readers can imagine themselves having in an analogous situation. The pig and, the story implies, animals more generally are not so different from people, at least in desiring freedom from oppression. Yet just as significant, “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” reveals the contradiction between human perceptions of their treatments of animals and the actual pain they suffer. Understanding this contradiction, Miyazawa's narrative suggests, is essential to reconfiguring human behaviors vis-à-vis ecosystems. The indifference of those who exploit environments is treated more subtly in A Cheng's “Turnover” (1988). Unlike this Chinese writer's earlier King of Trees (1985), discussed in Chapter 2, which exposes the environmental tragedies of the Cultural Revolution, “Turnover” engages with the perennial problem of trash.52 The narrator gives little indication of when the events he describes take place, his discourse and title suggesting instead that they are a never-ending cycle. Place is also nebulous. The opening line of “Turnover” locates the story in a specific city, Yuyin, which the narrator immediately claims is “a semi-important city in Xi’nan Province.”53 The story's spatial focus belies its broad applicability: Yuyin is an imaginary city and Xi’nan an imaginary province. Ah Cheng's story, containing few cultural markers, in fact addresses environmental conflicts facing urban sites across China and around the world. “Turnover” focuses on the creation, collection, transportation, and salvaging of garbage. In the first part of the story the narrator emphasizes the wastefulness of Yuyin's residents, who eagerly consume and discard tangible Page 352 →items without thinking about the environmental impact. The second part, in contrast, highlights the gusto with which both the people of Yuyin and those outside the metropolis salvage the city's waste from its mountain landfill, located thirty miles away. They ponder the origins of this waste, take it home, and at times resell it back in Yuyin; for these individuals, one person's trash is truly another's treasure. “Turnover” highlights both behavioral and attitudinal contradictions vis-à-vis the natural world. In a classic case of behavioral ambiguity, the people of Yuyin are portrayed as both extremely wasteful and extremely resourceful. Similarly, the narrator's attitude toward tangible items differs significantly from the attitudes of both urbanites and those who live closer to the city's landfill. But even more important than such disparities is the disjuncture between how much trash the city can handle in its landfills and people's indifference to the afterlives of their rubbish. Likewise, the story suggests that people's passion for salvaging trash simply encourages its continued production and further strains the area's ecosystems. Although in some ways similar to the creative works examined in Chapter 7, A Cheng's narrative does not contrast attitudes about the importance of “greening” environments with behaviors that compromise environments. Characters in “Turnover” are obsessed with using and salvaging things, not with improving ecosystems. Stating only that although impoverished, Yuyin “strives not to be filthy” (wushi qiong er buzang), the narrator gives no indication that the people residing there are environmentally conscious.54 Far from protesting the city's practice of depositing its garbage so close to their villages, people living in the mountains near Yuyin eagerly await the refuse trucks. The principal dissonance expressed in “Turnover” is therefore between the myopic attitudes of the characters toward the life cycles of tangible things (celebrating the mere existence of these objects, whether new or trashed, and indifferent to the effects of behaviors) and the long-term implications of such attitudes

(overflowing landfills with too much trash for even the most ardent salvagers). A Cheng's story addresses this incongruity implicitly if not explicitly. The opening paragraph, describing the creation of trash in Yuyin, highlights the city's wastefulness: Eating and drinking go on day and night, and things that can't go into people's mouths are discarded, piling up like mountains [ru shan]. All sorts of manufacturing thrives there, and materials that aren't used are gathered into mountainous piles [ru shan]. In addition, there are new ways of consuming, both homegrown and imported, that have to some degree seeped into the city and excited people but that have Page 353 →increased assorted garbage. In this way, Yuyin's daily trash nears one hundred tons…There are many mountains [shan] in Yuyin.55 Garbage piles up like mountains, as do references to it doing so. The ratio of people to garbage is also revealing: one hundred tons of trash for more than a million people computes to less than one-fifth of a pound of trash per person a day. This amount seems both inconsistent with the behaviors that have just been described, and by itself insignificant. But here and in following paragraphs the narrator reveals just how rapidly even the smallest per capita increases can translate into massive overflows. Fortunately, the narrator comments, as talented as the city is at creating trash, Yuyin's greatest strength at present is getting rid of it. The city has transformed an arid, enclosed valley into a dump several hundred yards deep and ten miles in diameter, which can hold 10,000 tons of trash. Dozens of deafening and polluting garbage trucks travel to this landfill daily, discarding the city's latest hundred tons of trash. The trucks gallop through the streets of Yuyin, “shaking heaven and earth” and rendering alarm clocks obsolete; they parade up a winding road into the mountains, where they frighten dogs, chickens, and pedestrians; and finally they methodically circle the dump's perimeter and disgorge their filthy loads into the mouth of the valley: The world suddenly falls into silence. A ray of golden light hauls up the wheel of the sun, the sun that sits precisely in the mountain pass. Many golden rays then pierce the morning mist and one after the other shoot at the trucks. Looking as if it's about to ignite, the orange paint on the trucks now shines brilliantly, blindingly. A wave of heat goes through the entire body of each truck. With a great blast dozens of truck beds gradually begin to rise up to forty-five degrees. Having a premonition, hundreds of mountain birds let out a yell and soar into the sky like smoke. The hundred tons of trash gradually begin to slide, sounding like muffled thunder. Once the trash leaves the trucks it builds speed and drains straight down the mountain like a waterfall [bian pubu ban shunshan zhi xiexiaqu]. Obstructed by rocky outcroppings on its journey, the garbage splashes like spray [ru shuihua yiyang jiankai], dissolving some of Yuyin's secrets. The sun's rays stir up the trash and gild the mountain slopes with glimmering colors of every hue. And then smoke and dust seethe, churn, and swirl around, purplish red and green powder forming colored, low-hanging clouds in the mountains. After giving their salute, the truck beds gradually return to their original positions. The trucks move.56 Page 354 → At first the natural world reigns, morning sun attacking the trucks. But the nonhuman is quickly overwhelmed. No sooner do the truck beds tilt than hundreds of mountain birds scream and take flight. Their rise is accompanied by the fall of a hundred tons of trash, this waterfall (pubu) and its spray (shuihua) nearly overpowering the natural world. Just as mountains of garbage obscure “real” mountains, so too do garbage waterfalls threaten to replace their more “natural” counterparts. The sun returns, but only briefly; it stirs up trash and colors the mountain slopes, but it soon is defeated by the smoke and powder released by the trash, which color the sky and create lowhanging clouds. A Cheng's narrative claims this dramatic series of events occurs daily, the enclosed valley treated as a bottomless pit. But its capacity is actually only ten thousand tons. This might seem quite substantial, but if no trash is removed from the landfill, it can hold only a hundred days’ worth of refuse. Even if the people of Yuyin create

only three ounces of garbage per person per day, their garbage pit will quickly overflow. Yet they continue consuming and discarding trash, under the illusion that there is no risk of running out of space. Characters in “Turnover” salvage items with the same excitement that they consume and dispose of them. But salvaging both enables and considerably obscures the inevitable fate of the valley. The narrator detracts attention from the impending overflow by describing how more than a thousand people eagerly await Yuyin's garbage trucks and, after the garbage has been unloaded, run down into the landfill faster even than the birds, greatly frightening the animals. What might be assumed to be a chaotic, unpleasant, and malodorous experience instead is described as a celebration. People sort through the trash meticulously, rescuing items of all kinds. Once back at the top of the valley, they discuss the likely origins of their findings—everything from love letters to metal scraps—and exchange items they do not want for themselves. And then, when they no longer can bear the heat, they begin the long walk home, trash on their backs, attendants at waste-buying stations in Yuyin eagerly awaiting their arrival. The merriment continues to the end for both people and their trash: Trash is the luckiest of all. Coming and going it doesn't have to rush or worry. Particularly on the return journey, it sits on a palanquin like a wealthy man. And it doesn't get lonely, since people are singing the whole way. All the hills are listening to those songs. Trash on their shoulders, the local people are exceptionally happy. The road is long, after all, so raising their varied voices, they sing: Page 355 → Sun up in the east Sun down in the west So good!… Unearth golden fruit Return home, greet my wife So fast! Ahei-hei!57 Delusion brings with it great joy. Removing thousands of pounds of garbage from the valley each day, these people extend somewhat the life of Yuyin's landfill. But their festive mood and paean to the sun belie the very serious consequences of their existing relationships with tangible items; even if every person salvaging trash were to remove fifty pounds from the valley each day, the pit's life would be prolonged by only about one month. The indifference of people who produce this trash toward the realities of their landfill enables continued exploitation. It is likely that the residents of Yuyin do not think about the limitations of this site because they believe it can contain whatever they discard; and perhaps they assume that should the valley ever fill up, they can readily turn another bodyscape into a second landfill. On the other hand, a comment early in the text suggests that the latter is easier said than done; the narrator indicates that the geological formation the people of Yuyin now are using as their landfill is somewhat of a rarity. The paradox persists, unresolved and probably irresolvable. Some texts—including the Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi's “He–y, Come on Ou–t”—parody indifference to environmental degradation even more forcefully.58 This short-short story features a mysterious opening in the ground that is discovered after a typhoon sweeps away a small mountain shrine. Although only one meter across, this fantastic cavity appears infinitely deep. Delighted that they have discovered seemingly limitless space for their waste, people rapidly transform the hole into a repository for everything from photographs of former lovers to classified documents, forensic evidence, bodies of deceased vagrants and animals used in contagious disease

experiments, and, most notably, nuclear waste. The narrator indicates that residents of both the village and a nearby city harbor some concern about the long-term effects of these behaviors. But villagers are appeased with assurances that “there would be absolutely no above-ground damage for several thousand years.”59 They also are promised a portion of the profits of the newly created hole-filling company, so they give their approval. Although the opening gives city dwellers a “sense of peace,” they are said to “dislike thinking about how things would wind up.”60 So instead they “do nothing Page 356 →but zealously produce one thing after another…aiming at the heavens, new buildings are constructed, one after the other.”61 People believe that the cavity not only solves current waste disposal dilemmas but also will resolve any problems that it itself creates. “He–y, Come on Ou–t” is clearly a parody of the human obsession with production and consumption: people attempt to allay fears about the consequences of such behaviors on environments by intensifying rather than tempering them. This story also parodies the illusion that there is no human behavior the nonhuman cannot endure. Even more important, it calls attention to a frequent yet overlooked enabler of this perception: environments that not only fail to provide any obvious physical evidence of damage but also appear to have improved. Unlike Miyazawa's story, where the pig's suffering is readily visible to those who abuse the animal, or A Cheng's narrative, where the gradually rising garbage level should be apparent to those who generate and salvage trash, people in Hoshi's text cannot physically observe the consequences of their behavior until it is too late.62 Instead, they notice that environments seem in better condition than before. As the narrator remarks: “People thought this was preferable to throwing trash into the ocean…No matter what one wished to throw out, the hole accepted it all [nandemo hikiuketekureta]. The hole flushed out the city's pollution [ana wa, tokai no yogore o arainagashitekureta]. The seas and the skies looked as though they had cleared up a bit [ikura ka sundekita].”63 But the story's conclusion, echoing the scene of the hole's initial discovery, suggests that even though the sky is clear blue and the horizon grows ever more beautiful, the earth itself has begun to resemble the garbage hole people had hoped would accept their refuse into eternity. Early in the story a young man looks into the opening, shouts “He–y, come on ou–t,” throws in a pebble, and is met with silence; the story similarly concludes with a construction worker high atop the frame of a new building who hears a voice shouting “He–y, come on ou–t.” A pebble follows from the skies, but, “idly gazing at the city's increasingly beautiful skyline, the man failed to notice.”64 Even if he had noticed this lone stone, it is unlikely he would have recognized its significance. Miyazawa Kenji's “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” focuses on the plight of a single pig at an imaginary agricultural school, A Cheng's “Turnover” on the movement of trash between a fictional city and its landfill, and Hoshi Shin’ichi's “He–y, Come on Ou–t” on the accumulation of trash in a single, fantastic cavity. But all three narratives have much broader significance. Revealing the actual and potential consequences of people's indifference toward how their behaviors affect ecosystems, these works paint a sobering Page 357 →and ambiguous picture of past, present, and potential human shaping of the nonhuman.

Culture, Civilization, and Damaged Environments Creative and other discourse on environments has long negotiated the complex relationships between “nature” and “culture”/“civilization.” Some texts, such as the Jamaican writer Olive Senior's poem “Seeing the Light,” depict the two as completely incompatible: Gardening in the Tropics nowadays means letting in light: they've brought in machines that can lay waste hundreds of hectares in one day… The animals are gone too… By the time they've cut

the last tree in the jungle only our bones Will remain as testament to this effort to bring light (though in their chronicles they might have recorded it by another name: Conquista? Evangelismo? Civilización?)65 Others, such as the Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong's essay “Shatian shanju” (Shatin Mountain Residence, 1974), attempt to depict “culture” as comfortably ensconced in “nature” and even adding to its allure.66 Celebrating Hong Kong's Shatin Mountains and claiming to have become a “mountain man,” the first-person narrator describes deep connections with the nonhuman world: The blue mountains and green waters, I never get tired of looking at them…Let the wind blow, let the eagles fly, let my blurred sight extend and go back and forth. As for me, I've been in the middle of this, looking down at earth and up at heaven, breathing sunrise and sunset…People ask why I stay in the emerald mountains. I smile but don't respond. The mountains have already answered [da le] for me. In fact, it's not the mountains that have answered [huida]. It's the birds that answered [da le] for the mountains, it's the insects, it's the winds in the pines that answered [da le] for the mountains.67 Page 358 → The wonders of the landscape speak, literally, for themselves; it is readily apparent why the narrator chooses to live here. But in truth, he is not as isolated as the opening of his essay implies. He eventually reveals that he not only basks daily in the wonders of the country-side but also commutes to the art school of United College at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Talk quickly returns to the wonders of the landscape surrounding his home and glorious mountain sunsets. But with the end of the essay approaching, the narrator begins commenting on the presence of human cultural artifacts within proximate landscapes, some of which he claims to be seeing for the first time. He again attempts to return to describing the nonhuman but is soon lured back, claiming: “Even if they shake the world, all tides and the sounds of the wind are really doing is adding a little excitement and rustic charm to the boundless quiet of the countryside. The noises that most fascinate the bottom of the human heart are made by human beings [renwei de saoyin].”68 The narrator romanticizes the trains that run between sea and mountains from morning to night. Even today, these “veteran conveyances of the industrial age retain the enchanting affect of the old world, hauling flowing hair of black smoke and winding slender, thirteen-car figures.”69 Neither the trailing hair-like smoke nor the iron and steel sparks described elsewhere disturb the region's ecosystems. Instead, the narrator of “Shatin Mountain Residence” indicates that when he looks out from his deck he sees mountains, green mountains everywhere, their layers folding one into another. He admits to spotting smoke but claims that it is overwhelmed by the mountains and the waters. This space has been home to 5,000 years of Chinese history and billions of Chinese people, but its greenery allegedly endures. Yu Guangzhong's essay suggests that apathy regarding the actual resilience of environments to the incursions of modern society significantly enhances the belief that ecosystems can sustain human behaviors, no matter how excessive; “Shatin Mountain Residence” does not itself speak of ecological degradation, but 1970s Hong Kong, like other parts of East Asia, suffered from numerous environmental ills and was hardly the paradise Yu Guangzhong describes. In contrast, many creative works explicitly condemn striving for “culture” or “civilization” not only for playing a central role in degrading environments but also for encouraging illusions that this degradation is necessary and will not adversely affect human futures.70 These texts generally use the terms “culture” and “civilization” without precision, but they often are euphemisms for modern, industrial societies, societies that are dedicated to creating ever-more sophisticated artifacts but that are founded on destroying both human and nonhuman lives. Creative works expose people Page 359 →as believing themselves civilized but in many ways as being anything but. They implicitly put forward the problem Rachel Carson addresses directly in

Silent Spring: “Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying [of the Japanese beetle] raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”71 These texts, like many others engaging with environmental issues, also suggest that “civilization” has not been worth the high human and nonhuman cost.72 Some writings, including the Korean author Ko n's poem “Ppsngp’o e s” (At Ppsngp’o, 1991), directly chastise societies for destroying everything in the name of civilization. Others, including the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's “Mulso kajuk kabang” (Buffalo Hide Bags, 2005), depict civilizations as profiting from unnecessary humaninduced ecodegradation. But many more texts portray the destruction of the nonhuman as deeply intertwined with that of human civilizations, despite people's frequent perceptions to the contrary. These include the Korean writer Chng Hynjong's poem “Kip’n hlk” (Deep Soil, 1992), the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao's poem “Nihonjin no senzo” (Ancestors of the Japanese, 1986), the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngja's poem “Yido kwangsigok” (Rhapsody of Yido, 1984), and most dramatically the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong's three-volume novel Yellow Peril (1991). Ko n's brief poem “At Ppsngp’o”—sited at a port on the western coast of Korea's South Chlla Province, in the country's southwest corner— scathingly critiques human destruction of life in the names of culture and civilization while admitting that there might be no alternative.73 The text begins with an individual being forced into the ocean by the darkness (dum) of “life that loathes light” (pich’l miwhann saengmyng) but rescued by strong waves that push him back, declaring, “Not you! / Not you!” (nnn andwae).74 These lines are repeated at the end of the poem, where the speaker reiterates the ocean's message to him, “Not you! // The depths of the sea also rejected me / Not you!” Sandwiched between the rejections is a fundamental question followed by a blanket excoriation of human behaviors: “What should human beings [in’gan] do? / Until now human beings [in’gan] / killing everything / have called it culture or civilization [hogn munhwa hogn munmyng].” Although its title refers to a specific place in Korea, Ko n's poem speaks of people in general. “At Ppsngp’o” depicts culture/civilization as primarily concerned not with creation but instead with destruction. Even more disparagingly, the text suggests that “killing everything” and mislabeling what comes after as culture/civilization might be the only behaviors Page 360 →people can envision. Emboldened by the perceived importance of their acts, humans—even those who are assaulted by the same darkness that the poem depicts as destroying everything—are at a loss to do otherwise.75 Much more specific about how human societies rely unnecessarily on nonhuman death are creative texts such as the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngho's “Buffalo Hide Bags,” which describes bison being slaughtered and processed for people's consumption; these animals are reincarnated not only as packaged meat but also as leather bags that hold the papers of treacherous government officials and company employees. The poem opens by declaring, “Civilization needs your death” (munmyngen n i chugm i p’ilyo hada) followed by several lines that explain just how civilization—here in the guise of various industries—uses dead buffalo: Civilization needs your death When your bones are smashed into cow bones for industry and your body is split up into packaged meat workers in the leather factory will begin to tan and dye your hide buffalo graves of hides, exhibited in display windows76 The opening two stanzas of “Buffalo Hide Bags” depict civilization as originating in behaviors that could be

considered decidedly uncivilized—pulverizing bones, tearing apart bodies, and reshaping skin for shop windows. Like the whale meat depicted in Ch’oe Sngho's poem “In the Refrigerated City,” these origins naturally are concealed when the reconfigured buffalo are put on display as hides. Echoing the poem's opening line, the first line of the third stanza— “Civilization needs your appetite” (munmy ngen n i sigyogi p’ilyohada)— asserts that society needs not just the bison's death but also its hunger. The following lines explain that just like the living animal, bags made of its hide must swell with all manner of materials; range grasses are replaced by sheaves of documents and company and personal seals. People rely on the large capacity of buffalo bags to conceal the evidence of their various schemes, including murder. So dependent are people on buffalo that the animals are implicated in these plots, the poem claiming, “You [buffalo] now participate in murder conspiracies.”77 This change of roles has taken its toll on the buffalo, Page 361 →the third stanza concluding: “Your numbers swell with that of / mercenaries holding bags / company employees holding bags.” Civilizations profit directly from the unnecessary slaughter of these animals. Most telling in this regard is the final stanza, which contains the poem's third reference to civilization and a clear parody of it: “Oh iron-horned, powerful civilization / strike down and kill buffalo with bags.” Buffalo transformed into cultural products are themselves expected to murder other buffalo on the assumption that their numbers easily can withstand such treatment. But when in the third stanza the poem speaks of numbers swelling, it is referring to numbers of buffalo-hide bags, not to numbers of buffalo, since the latter decrease as the former increase. “Buffalo Hide Bags” ridicules “civilization” for relying on both the appetite and the death of the buffalo; the buffalo's numbers being numbered, it is likely that this dependence and thus perhaps even civilization itself will no longer be sustainable. Speaking more explicitly about the flimsiness of human creations if not industrial civilizations are texts such as the Korean writer Chng Hynjong's deceptively simple “Deep Soil.”78 The opening, middle, and closing stanzas of this five-stanza poem contrast the physical and spiritual depth of both the natural world and earlier human societies with the shallowness of modern infrastructure, while the second and fourth stanzas point alternatively to damage to the nonhuman and to its resistance. Whereas Chng Hynjong's poem “Death God,” discussed in Chapter 5, depicted a city drowning in asphalt, the flimsy pavement of “Deep Soil” is confined to a rural road: When it was a dirt road, the ascending road was deep, deep. After it was paved, the depth disappeared from that road. Forest spirits have also disappeared. Deep soil flimsy asphalt. Animal convenience human inconvenience Deep nature shallow civilization79 Page 362 → Using asphalt as synecdoche of industrial civilization and soil as synecdoche of the nonhuman, “Deep Soil”

explicitly contrasts the shallowness and superficiality of the former with the physical and spiritual depth of the latter. At the same time, the poem confirms that modernizing infrastructure necessarily damages environments; while deep dirt roads are at least somewat rooted in nature and can be relatively undisruptive to local ecosystems, even physically shallow manifestations of industrial civilization such as “flimsy asphalt” can cause significant destruction. “Deep Soil” notes that asphalt, applied to the ground in thin layers, has nowhere near the thickness of the soil it covers. But Chng Hynjong's poem also indicates that its impact on the ground is more than its physical depth would suggest. The first stanza states that paving the road destroyed its thickness. This line can be interpreted in several ways. Most simply, now that the road is paved, its top layer is nowhere near as thick as before. More important, the poem suggests that with the paving of the dirt road—a relatively harmonious contact space between people and the nonhuman—the natural world has also been affected. This reading is substantiated in the following line, which declares that “the forest spirits have also disappeared.” Although the poem does not say so explicitly, the absence of “forest spirits” (sup’i chngnyngdl) suggests that notable damage has been inflicted on the forest itself. Regardless, the text makes it clear that paving the road has done more than simply cover soil: asphalt readily leaches chemicals into the ground, fouling spaces well beyond the visible. This is not surprising, considering that mountain roads can cause more damage to local ecosystems than other parts of the built environment.80 Chng Hynjong's fourth stanza speaks intriguingly of “animal convenience / human inconvenience” (chimsngsrn py’lli / saramdaun pulp’yn). These lines suggest that despite what people have done to the soil, they are the ones who are ultimately inconvenienced, not their nonhuman counterparts. “Deep Soil” here implies that human damage of environments, damage done to increase the convenience of daily (human) life, could have been much worse. Instead, with soil still covering far more ground than asphalt, ecosystems remain more “convenient” for animals than they do for people. Convenience does not imply health, but it does indicate a certain amount of resilience. Thus when the poem concludes simply “deep nature / shallow civilization,” it is unclear whether the term “shallow” (yat’n munmyng) refers not only to the physical and spiritual depth/resilience of human civilization but also to the overall human shaping of environments. While in the third stanza the term “flimsy” belies the effect of asphalt on surrounding landscapes, the term “shallow” in the final stanza could be taken Page 363 →more literally. Even so, by calling attention to superficial and flimsy human civilization, as well as to the damage to the nonhuman inflicted in the name of civilization, “Deep Soil” points to the potential degeneration of both. This intertwining is more explicit in Sakaki Nanao's poem “Ancestors of the Japanese,” a scathing indictment of Japanese for abusing landscapes both at home and abroad as well as a satire of the destruction of these spaces, and ultimately the human societies that inhabit them, for the sake of happiness, future generations, and above all “culture” (bunka). “Ancestors of the Japanese” begins with an intoxicated man in a spotless, explicitly cockroachfree kitchen announcing, “Ainu are the ancestors of Japanese.”81 In the following stanza the poem declares this claim absurd. Instead, it argues, “The ancestors of the Japanese are neither the Ainu nor Americans / they are cockroaches.” Likening contemporary Japanese to these resilient insects that feed on almost everything, and distinguishing them from both indigenous Japanese and relatively recent foreign arrivals, the poem's third stanza alleges that in Hokkaido there now are villages that, in order to create a joyous society, consume even the most lethal substances. These include radioactive waste, which comes to Hokkaido from other parts of Japan; only one of Japan's dozens of nuclear power plants is located on its northern island, and this plant (in the village of Tomari, on Hokkaido's southwestern seacoast) did not begin commercial operation until June 1989, three years after Sakaki wrote the poem: Collapse of Ainu peace, now in Hokkaido there are communities that say let's make a cheerful happy society [akaruku tanoshii shakai o tsukur to]

that eats even the irradiated garbage of nuclear power plants. “Ancestors of the Japanese” does not specify whether the Ainu are the only people in Hokkaido consuming radioactive waste (i.e., food that has been tainted by this waste) or whether other Japanese there eat a similar diet and have their tranquility destroyed as well. The poem also leaves open several troubling possibilities: villages seeking a happy society are voluntarily consuming poisonous substances, under the illusion that this will help build such a community on a national scale; villages working hardest to establish a peaceful society ironically are the most poisoned; villagers are echoing official Japanese rhetoric that justifies poisoning sparsely populated spaces and minority populations in order to create a harmonious, peaceful national society. Page 364 → Possibly communities in Hokkaido have become convinced they must bear this burden for the whole of Japanese society and have donated space in their towns for waste depositories. Far more likely is that garbage from elsewhere in Japan has been foisted on Hokkaido's villages, leaving residents little choice but to ingest the chemicals that leach from this refuse into the island's water, soil, vegetation (including crops), animals, and ultimately themselves. Even so, exhibiting exceptional tenacity, they remain determined to create a cheerful society. It is also likely that in doing so they are mimicking official Japanese rhetoric. Declaring that Ainu peace has collapsed (Ainutachi no heiwa yabure), “Ancestors of the Japanese” highlights the ludicrousness of the common argument that environmental destruction is the unavoidable price of human bliss. Sakaki's poem implies that the people who ingest poison might be propagating the contention, however sarcastically, that pollution is a small price to pay for happiness. This shows just how far the Japanese “cockroaches” have extended their reach and suggests just how deeply such arguments can infiltrate human consciousness. In the following stanzas, “Ancestors of the Japanese” gives some idea of the physical and ecological breadth of Japanese-induced destruction; revealing the global reach of Japan's environmental damage, the poem describes how Japanese have plundered landscapes elsewhere in the archipelago, in other parts of Asia, and in South America. It also offers another justification for environmental destruction. Whereas radioactive waste was dumped in Hokkaido and consumed by communities on the island purportedly to create social concord, forests are leveled, rare animals and plants are devoured, and land and water are devastated around the world allegedly for the sake of Japan's children: There are government offices that suck to the bone the woods called national forests the treasures of all. Even that being insufficient on the other side of the ocean seeking toilet paper they infest the Amazon jungle swarms of Japanese cockroaches They live in flower gardens of oil and plastics, and from the Korean peninsula 50 billion yen of Matsutake mushrooms on which to smack lips, and from China Page 365 →

mamushi 10 million of the aphrodisiacal animal cockroaches 100 million middle class Japanese building the future for children ground overflowing with agrochemicals rivers and lakes of sludge leaving behind the burial grounds of coral reefs adults working energetically.82 Finding their own forests insufficient and filling even their gardens with oil and plastics, the Japanese plunder Amazonian jungles for materials to produce such staples as toilet paper.83 They also purchase from Korea such luxuries as the highly prized and extremely expensive Matsutake mushroom and from China millions of poisonous snakes valued as love potions.84 The next stanza speaks of damaged, even destroyed land and water. Not specifying the location of the devastated bodies, the poem—summarizing what the Japanese have done to diverse ecosystems—suggests that they are found globally. Soaked with irony, “Ancestors of the Japanese” alleges that all this has been done “energetically” (genki de) in the name of “building the future for children” (mirai o kizuku kodomora no tame). What people fail to comprehend fully, the poem suggests, is that leaving their descendants soil suffused with agrochemicals, severely polluted rivers and lakes, and coral reefs in shambles is at best guaranteeing them years of environmental recovery, should they wish to use these spaces productively, and at worst a planet with ever-shrinking habitable space. The concern of Japanese adults for the welfare of future generations, it is clear, is as shallow as their concern for their ecosystems. Justifying environmental disruption in order to create a cheerful society and benefit future generations leads to asserting that destruction is necessary to realize the cultured life, expressed in the concluding stanza: Now living up to the glorious Japanese constitution for the happy cultural life more koalas more missiles. Here “Ancestors of the Japanese” ridicules the Japanese for their claim that more koalas for their zoos (relocating animals) and more missiles for their Page 366 →arsenals (putting both people and animals at greater risk) will allow them not only to live up to the expectations of their nation's “glorious constitution” (keiaru / Nihonkoku kenp ni nottori) but also to lead a “happy” and “cultural” life (kfukude bunkateki na seikatsu no tame). The poem notably refrains from speaking of actual as opposed to sought-after happiness. Japanese are described as living in “flower gardens of oil and plastics” and as working “energetically,” not actually as being content. Sakaki's poem depicts Japanese as more successful with establishing culture than with attaining human happiness or ecological balance, although the “culture” that has been achieved is not without problems. “Ancestors of the Japanese” emphasizes that this “culture” depends on devastated ecosystems. Producing toilet paper, plastics, and oil, three basics of contemporary life, wreaks considerable damage on environments near and far. The poem suggests that the same is true of Matsutake mushrooms and mamushi, which despite their great expense are claimed to be part of the lives of most Japanese.85 In addition to highlighting the inseparability of Japanese “culture” and damaged environments, “Ancestors of the Japanese” also preempts any claim that this culture is

attractive, much less illustrious. It suggests that a society founded on destruction, no matter how glorious its achievements, is not something to be desired.86 Sakaki's poem gives no alternatives. It portrays Japanese claims that ecosystems are being destroyed to achieve happiness and culture as at best misguided and at worst nearly diabolical. The coda of “Ancestors of the Japanese” depicts a space that has been relatively spared: “An ancient forest of red Hokkaido pines / a brown bear looking at the moon.” This bear is simply looking, not howling at the moon like Hagiwara Sakutar's sick, terrified, and plaintive canine in the acclaimed Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon, 1917); there is no sign in Sakaki's text that anything is amiss. And, not coincidentally, the old-growth forest in which it stands is where poetry is being created; the coda is followed by the place-stamp “Shokanbetsu sanchi, Hokkaido.” But does composing poetry in Shokanbetsu sanchi, to which the writer has imported literary culture, in some ways signal the beginning of the end for both? Poetry can be one of the least obviously destructive forms of human culture, but is it entirely innocuous? Describing a brown bear looking at the moon does not put either the bear or the writer in immediate danger. But it does point to untapped resources for which modern societies frequently hunger and when exploited can jeopardize the future of human, not to mention nonhuman life. As with “Ancestors of the Japanese,” the Korean writer Ch’oe Sngja's lengthy poem “Rhapsody of Yido” acerbically highlights the senselessness and despair of human existence, ridiculing Koreans for deluding themselves that they are cultured because of their metropolitan attitudes, behaviors, Page 367 →and lifestyles.87 Y i Island (Kr. Yido), often called Korea's Manhattan, is Seoul's largest island and home to South Korea's stock exchange and the headquarters of numerous corporations, banks, and broadcasters. Also the location of South Korea's National Assembly, this island is a frequent site of political protests. Now protected from the waters of the Han River by dikes and boasting some of Seoul's most valuable real estate, Yido for centuries was used as farmland. During the colonial period the Japanese built an airfield there, but it was not until the late 1960s that large-scale construction began. Ch’oe Sngja's poem argues that this “culture” of incessant consumption and production injures both people and the nonhuman; like much Korean verse on devastated environments, from its opening section “Rhapsody of Yido” integrates portrayals of human anguish with scenes of damaged landscapes. In addition, the poem concludes its first, fourth, and sixth (and final) sections with ironic declarations about Yido's status as “bread of heaven” (ch’nsang i ppang). “Rhapsody of Yido” converts the biblical “bread of heaven”—sent down by God to nourish starving people both physically (e.g., Exodus 16; Psalms 78, 105) and spiritually, in the form of Jesus (e.g., John 6)—into a polluted, fermenting, swelling mass. By doing so, the poem accentuates the enormity of environmental destruction: people have devastated the one thing that can save them, both physically and spiritually. The poem also accentuates conflicts between perceptions and empirical evidence. People might believe this island is the “bread of heaven,” in that it has brought wealth to so many, but they have transformed it into something that quickly risks becoming the hellish world of shantytowns and trash so graphically portrayed in the Turkish writer Latife Tekin's novel Berci Kristin çöp Masallar (Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, 1984), published the same year.88 The opening stanza of “Rhapsody of Yido” likens protestors swarming across Wnhyo Bridge to heavenly dough in the process of fermenting; in contrast, the fourth and sixth sections of the poem use the same metaphor to describe the island's rising trash heaps. People are replaced, if not buried, by their garbage, which appears to have overtaken the island. The poem's first stanza concludes: Gradually fermenting in the sunlight of noxious pigment gigantic lump of dough, beginning to ferment —Yido bread of the sacred heavens .89 Here the dough is only starting to ferment, but it soon will begin rising uncontrollably. Following sections reveal people and landscapes as horribly distorted, Ch’oe Sngja maximizing graphic language and imagery by speaking

Page 368 →of people walking around with “hearts, genitals, and anuses / hanging on their faces.”90 By the conclusion of the poem, this bread gyrates frenziedly: Yido, lying on its back, is a giant myriopod. Neon signs are attached to the end of each of its innumerable feet and it wiggles tens of thousands of its toes toward the sky its mouth that from morning to night has eaten all manner of filth quietly vomits it up like crab's froth In the deepest part of Yido's void its dark gigantic mouth that assumes the shape of God chews on the remaining bones of this world. —Yido bread of the sacred heavens .91 Equating the island with an insect that tirelessly flashes infinite numbers of neon lights and gorges itself on human waste, these stanzas reveal some of the contradictions of civilization: tremendous glitter (Yido's swarms of brightly lit skyscrapers, which like those of most densely built cities resemble a supine insect with flashy footwear) accompanied by endlessly swelling garbage mounds. The waste that civilizations produce can be ingested by the nonhuman, but it cannot be sufficiently digested. So it is spewed forth, increasing the volume of the island and burying it even more deeply in garbage. No part of this landmass is spared; even its most remote corners are described as diligently chomping away on scraps. More critical of the injuries people have inflicted on their environments is the first stanza of the poem's fourth section, which explicitly addresses the question of culture: Time flows efficiently, efficiently by itself Look! Atop our garbage heaps, atop the reeking and profound culture's oven rapidly spread odor hugely swelling and rising Yido —Yido bread of the colossal heavens 92 Here the text not only satirizes perceptions that the island is heavenly bread, capable of nourishing all who hunger, but also exposes the underside of contemporary Korean lifestyles, which create and cook (shape) this bread (waste); the oven of culture has replaced that of spirituality. Korean culture Page 369 →is at once “reeking” (kurinnae) and “profound” (kk), its sleek buildings unable to mask either their trash or ultimately their gradual self-burial as garbage continues to pile up and threatens to plug the spaces between edifices. Ch’oe Sngja's text portrays the destruction of ecosystems as deeply intertwined with the demise of Korean culture. Fooling

themselves that the landscape can sustain behaviors intended to advance their civilization, people jeopardize the future of both human and nonhuman lives. “Rhapsody of Yido” vividly depicts a society nearly oblivious that it is charging into oblivion. Even more dramatic, although somewhat less colorful, is the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong's novel Yellow Peril, which was first published anonymously in Taipei and Port Credit, Ontario in 1991.93 This lengthy work is a scathing critique both of China's increasing materialism instigated by Deng Xiaoping's post–Cultural Revolution economic reforms, imagined correctly in the novel as reaching into the twenty-first century, and of the individuals and groups protesting these policies.94 Deng's market-oriented reforms reopened China to the world and were responsible for the nation's sustained economic growth beginning in the 1980s, but they also substantially increased gaps between rich and poor. The protests that resulted in the June Fourth Incident (Tiananmen Square demonstrations, 1989) were led in good part by labor groups incensed at these inequalities and ensuing corruption; egalitarian socialists angered at the materialism of China's market-oriented policies also played an important role, as did student groups seeking wider access to global information. Wang Lixiong's novel begins with people drowning not in garbage but in water, dikes along the Yellow River breaching at the turn of the twenty-first century; the novel concludes with human civilizations and much of the nonhuman destroyed not long thereafter. The novel highlights numerous forms of environmental ambiguity. Among the most significant is the contrast between the view that no matter how much people abuse their environments they will always have sufficient nonhuman resources to maintain their lifestyles and the reality that environments cannot indefinitely withstand human abuse. Yellow Peril takes up the alleged Chinese delusion that society's efficiency at exploiting resources will keep pace with population growth. The novel contrasts this outlook with the actuality that ecosystems are already so compromised that a sudden, large-scale catastrophe in China risks destroying human life world-wide. Featuring floods that devastate parts of China and nuclear attacks that annihilate multiple spaces, Yellow Peril illustrates worst-case yet not entirely unimaginable scenarios. The text focuses on human tragedy, but throughout it links human predicaments to destruction of landscapes. The title of Wang Lixiong's novel refers to the terror—felt by many Americans and Europeans, especially after Japan's victory over China in the Sino-Japanese Page 370 →War (1894–95)—of increased contact with East Asians; the term “Yellow Peril” evokes a horde of Asians ready to invade white nations and take jobs from white workers.95 The yellow peril became a popular theme in European and American fiction, with the British writers Matthew Phipps Shiel and Rudyard Kipling, the American writer Jack London, and many of their contemporaries imagining East Asians taking over the world.96 As William F. Wu has noted, “these xenophobic novels…[show the United States as] seriously threatened, clearly doomed, or destroyed.”97 Wang Lixiong's novel similarly portrays events in China as ultimately harming the entire planet. But in a notable reversal of their role in much Western yellow-peril fiction, Chinese in Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril leave their country as impoverished emigrants to foreign lands, not as conquerors. Human civilizations collapse worldwide because of Chinese weakness, not because of Chinese strength. Wang Lixiong's novel presents global civilization as so unstable that a single deluge can bring it to destruction. The narrator describes deadly flooding along the Yellow River caused by record rainfalls, compounded by breaks in dikes neglected by people who took city jobs that more obviously enhanced “civilization.” Nearly twenty million people have been displaced, far too many to be absorbed into neighboring provinces. This humanitarian crisis triggers increasingly severe calamities including a Chinese civil war, the nuclear annihilation of Taipei, a Taiwanese atomic strike meant for Beijing but instead hitting Russia, and nuclear attacks on China by the United Nations to destroy its nuclear capability. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are forced to emigrate to Russia, Europe, Australia, the United States, and Latin America. The ensuing chaos is unprecedented and nearly unimaginable; Russia and the United States engage in nuclear war, firing nearly 3,000 missiles at one another. Nuclear strikes detonate around the world, with Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, and India taking advantage of the melee to act on long-standing rivalries. Recognizing that it cannot survive the impending nuclear winter without adequate food supplies, the United States occupies Australia and Latin America, while Russia attacks Europe with nuclear missiles and occupies Africa and South Asia. There is nothing anyone can do to ward off further destruction. Ecosystems everywhere are obliterated:

The nuclear winter destroyed agricultural production the world over. Livestock died in large numbers because herbage stopped growing and the seasons were out of order. Marine products were sharply reduced because the rivers, lakes, and seas grew colder. Even when the nuclear winter had passed, it had a long-term influence on the climate.98 Lacking environments to sustain their people and manage their militaries, states tumble one after another. Page 371 → Those who manage to survive have no choice but to craft lifestyles that demand far less of their landscapes, attaining a balance that for centuries had proved elusive. But theirs are revealed as only temporary solutions. Near the end of the novel the narrator warns that it might be too late for ecosystems and thus human civilizations to recover: Civilization [wenming] was being destroyed on a large scale, people were dying in large numbers…Would human society become completely extinct? Or would it regress more than 1,000 years? When would a new equilibrium emerge? Or would the collapse be total? Is there any possibility that things could turn around? Or even completely new life grow out of old decomposing organisms? These questions still before us that no one can answer.99 Unlike in Hoshi Shin’ichi's short-short story “The Present,” discussed in Chapter 4, there is no assurance that total collapse will be followed by complete recovery, or indeed by any regeneration at all. Instead, the narrator follows his questions on everything from complete extinction to regression, equilibrium, utter annihilation, recovery, and ultimately entirely new life (quanxin de shengming)—by declaring: “These [are] questions still before us that no one can answer” (zhei shang shu yanqian shei ye huida bu liao de wenti). In his preface to the English translation of Yellow Peril (China Tidal Wave, 2008), published nearly two decades after its Chinese predecessor, Wang Lixiong admits that the novel presents a vision of China's future very different from what actually has transpired; China enjoys far more stability in the first decade of the twenty-first century than he had predicted. But he also asserts that China's single-party regime, like all authoritarian states, will collapse and therefore that “the ‘Yellow Peril’ is not far distant and may occur at any moment.”100 On the other hand, reaching out to readers accessing his book in translation, Wang Lixiong asserts that there is still time to stave off annihilation. He concludes the preface: “I had always hoped that Westerners would be able to read [the novel], not only because other countries apart from China are bound up with the events I have described. But also because the people of the whole world can help prevent the catastrophe for China and the world from happening.”101 Interesting here is how Wang Lixiong seems at once to suggest that “Western readers” are the only ones who do not understand the planet's plight and therefore need such a book and also to conflate “Western readers” with “the whole world.” In addition, not only does Yellow Peril concern itself with the future of the world, it demands the concern of individuals everywhere. The body of Wang Lixiong's novel implicates all people, while one of its introductions insists that people must participate in efforts to forestall the very disasters described. Page 372 → Yellow Peril suggests that although arrogance or ignorance can create calamitous chasms between perceptions and actual conditions, awareness of these chasms, particularly by outsiders, might allow for behavioral changes that will improve human and nonhuman futures. The novel underscores the tenacious but erroneous illusion that people can increase both their numbers and their per capita extractions from environments without adverse consequences: it features characters who cling to this conviction even when confronted with overwhelming proof of the contrary.102 Throughout the novel they argue with counterparts who try to convince them that China and the world have reached the breaking point, that people cannot recover from current crises in the same way they have overcome past setbacks because now their numbers are too large and nonhuman resources are too scarce. Depicting natural and human-induced crises that multiply exponentially, Yellow Peril increasingly confirms the likelihood of these apocalyptic predictions.

Early in the novel, Shi Ge—the leader of the crisis-management agency known officially as the State Security Research Institute, a unit with high responsibility but little status in the official hierarchy—attempts to convince the CCP general secretary and other key bureaucrats that China stands on precarious ground. Flooding in the Yellow River catchment area, exacerbated by faulty dikes, has destroyed cities, businesses, oil fields, and railways. It also has left nineteen million people homeless. While others want to discuss the economic effects of this upheaval, Shi Ge is more concerned with what these homeless survivors will do to the country. He predicts that hunger will drive them to violence, with devastating effects on social stability, including anarchy. The deputy director of the Central Government Policy Research Center disagrees; he had assumed that like their predecessors, the flood victims would not plunder crops planted by others but instead would plant their own. Shi Ge explains that growing new crops was possible in the past only because the state had ample grain reserves to feed displaced peoples; now, he notes, environmental damage and diminished production have caused an acute shortage of grain at the government's disposal.103 Shi Ge then draws attention to the difficulty Chinese long have had balancing their human population with their nonhuman resources: It wasn't just social injustice and political corruption that instigated the great rebellions of the Qing. There was another catalyst of utmost importance—a massive population surplus…The fundamental cause [of the rebellions] was the imbalance between population and resources…Ours is a huge country. But a giant on a steel wire can be pushed off with a single thumb. The steel wire is · · our population [which] already has reached the absolute limit of what the resources of our land can bear. The thumb is the Yellow River.104 Page 373 → Shi Ge seems to confuse his metaphors: China's population is the “giant” that has been toppled by the Yellow River. In any case, the officials are notably uncomfortable with Shi Ge's depiction of their nation, one protesting: “A country as great as ours, can it be as frail as you've played it up to be, knocked to the ground by the tiny Yellow River [yige xiaoxiao huanghe]?”105 The general secretary is equally unconvinced and orders those assembled to turn the discussion to practical solutions for current problems. When Shi Ge argues that dismantling China's army and particularly its nuclear weapons program is the only effective way to fund the purchase of enough grain to feed displaced people and preclude domestic violence, he loses credibility. But his prescience is soon confirmed. Ouyang Zhonghua, a writer and leader of the paradoxical environmental movement Green Party (the ambiguities of which are discussed in Chapter 7), has similar disagreements with his subordinates. He predicts that China can reasonably feed 500 million people, which would leave 800 million people to emigrate or starve. The director of one of Ouyang's Green Bases reminds him that Chinese have always recovered, even from state collapse: “Historically, our society has broken down any number of times, and it hasn't been as terrible as you describe.”106 Ouyang counters that this is because earlier generations had far more substantial safety nets; not only were there natural resources to spare, there were fewer people clamoring for these resources: The fundamental difference is the simple fact that our population is now 1.3 billion. No other collapse has ever involved even a third of that number of people…China's present size and environmental conditions allow it to fill 1.3 billion stomachs, but only if we depend completely on a very organized and efficient system that works at the highest capacity and bleeds natural resources…In the past, collapse of the state has not led to the extermination of the people. Now, the land's natural products have decreased severalfold while the population has increased several-fold. The terrifying discrepancy between population and products will make the collapse how many times worse than in the past…The basic reason for the impending collapse lies in the contradiction between population and resources. So we can foresee that no matter the particular course and form of collapse, the most fundamental orientation can only be extermination of the population. Only when the population falls—through wars, famines, pestilence, all means of creating death on a large scale—to a level where it matches resources does the collapse have its final chance of being brought under control.107 The first part of Ouyang's argument is watertight: China's natural resources (ziyuan) simply cannot support its

population (renkou), no matter how efficiently Page 374 →the latter use the former. More questionable is Ouyang's prediction that collapse is therefore inevitable and that the only recourse is widespread extermination. There are other possibilities, however unsavory, including sending people abroad and regulating childbirth more effectively, but in light of people's relative lack of foresight his prediction is likely correct. As he makes his case Ouyang is interrupted by arguments that conditions are not nearly as dire as he describes. One person claims that Chinese grain reserves are greater than they have ever been; Ouyang explains that although this was true before the flood and civil war, China's reserves now have nearly flatlined. Another says she simply cannot believe that only 500 million people will survive. Ouyang responds that he does not expect to be believed, but he insists that he is telling the truth. This is a truth that his audience clearly does not have the capacity to hear. Like Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, discussed above and in Chapter 4, Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril counters the illusion that people can procreate and produce as they desire without consequence. Both emphasize that this attitude is not unique to Chinese. China's population is larger than that of any other nation, but the narrator declares that what will prevent Chinese from warding off collapse by continuing to purchase grain from abroad is the world's burgeoning population, which makes demand of this substance far greater than supply. The narrator comments: “The grain could come only from imports. But these past few years the earth's population has exploded, ecosystems have degenerated, and grain is becoming frighteningly scarce.”108 The disparities among population, per capita demand, and available resources have become too great; environments around the world have reached their breaking points. And so, ultimately, everything must collapse. The only hope, the novel's epilogue suggests, is that the planet will have a second chance, as it does in Hoshi Shin’ichi's “The Present.” Wang Lixiong's final pages feature a man walking by himself, carrying an “inflated baby/doll” (chongqi wawa).109 Stopping to rest, he puts down both bags (xingli) and baby/doll (wawa), the latter of which is soon confirmed to be, or becomes, an actual child; two paragraphs later the man, now sowing seeds, “hears the cries of the baby” (tingdao le wawa jiao) and turns to see the baby stretch out his/her arms as though it wants to be embraced. People, or at least this one infant, appear to have somehow come back to life. And so too is the natural world beginning to revive, however slowly, the novel ending with the man “suddenly noticing the first pale green shoots” growing from seeds he had planted in the skeleton-infused, destitute, barren, and literally dead soil (siwang de tudi).110 Presenting an extreme but not entirely implausible series of events, Wang Lixiong's novel depicts human societies as living on the brink of destruction, at the mercy of one another and of the often exploited nonhuman. To be Page 375 →sure, by positing neglected dams as the trigger of the domino-like collapse first of China and then of civilizations around the world, Yellow Peril suggests that much of what transpires in the novel is not inevitable. On the other hand, by describing people as generally ignorant and arrogant about the sustainability of their behaviors, deluding themselves that there is no limit to what ecosystems can support, the narrative implies that the flooding of the Yellow River is only one of many thumbs that might topple China and the world from their precarious high-wire performances, and that although at least partial recovery might be possible, it will not be easily gained and might have to be achieved one person, one set of green shoots at a time. Much literature depicts an explosion of evidence on human degradation of environments giving rise to a near crisis in perception. A large part of this crisis involves conflicting evaluations: change interpreted by some as justifiable, if not desirable, is seen by others as unforgiveable, or even as a call to overhaul social structures and institutions; change interpreted by some as having no long-term consequences is seen by others as the beginning of the end. These more extreme positions bookend a variety of other perceptions. But no small number of creative works highlight the presence of illusions and delusions, demonstrating how perceptions contradict perceived actualities and revealing the implications of these disjunctions. Many of the texts examined in this chapter posit a relatively clear if often convoluted dichotomy between illusions of environmental stability and the realities of nonhuman instability because of ecodegradation. Desire for nonhuman health or the illusion of health is so powerful that people often do their best to make landscapes appear resuscitated, rather than actually resuscitating them. The narrator of Bai Xianyong's “A Day in Pleasantville,” for instance, notes how the leaves in suburbia are so shiny, plump, and swollen that they resemble artificial potted landscapes, while the lawns in wealthy towns are so perfectly uniform that it appears as though homeowners have

rolled out green plastic carpets. Going one step farther, rejecting even vegetation made green with chemicals in favor of chemical (artificial) vegetation, are the individuals populating such texts as Sakaki Nanao's poem “Midori eien nari” (Green Forever, 1980). This work is particularly intriguing because it manipulates perceptions of what constitute “genuine” nonhuman bodies and what constitute “artificial” human cultural artifacts. The opening stanza features what seem to be purely artificial trees, chosen for Tama New Town, a large residential development built in Tokyo in 1965, because they look like “genuine” trees. Unlike their living counterparts they do not shed leaves and thus simply can be planted and enjoyed. In contrast, speaking of events four centuries earlier, Page 376 →the second stanza features what appear to be purely “genuine” trees, which regularly shed their foliage. “Green Forever” begins: 10 years ago New Town Tokyo suburb wives gathered really want green in the square but fallen leaves are bothersome so they planted plastic evergreen trees 400 years ago Kyoto autumn morning fallen leaves cast off for his son old maple tree shaken by Riky 111 The difference between the two types of trees seems clear: those in the first group are human cultural artifacts, thus “fake,” while those in the second are “real” nonhuman bodies with leaves that fall in autumn. To be sure, the latter are not completely untouched by people, Sakaki's poem depicting their leaves as descending both by themselves and when shaken by Sen no Riky, Japan's most celebrated tea master, an individual noted for his distaste for ornament (i.e., artificiality). Sakaki's poem alludes to one of the stories surrounding Riky: Expecting guests, the tea master instructed his son to clean the garden. His son removed debris, pruned and shaped the plants, then swept until not a leaf remained. Riky was displeased at this “perfection,” claiming that “This is not the way.” So he shook a tree in the center of the garden, letting its fallen leaves form a random pattern.112 In doing so he used the human hand to mask the human hand. The “natural” only gives the illusion of being so. Although first taking the reader far back in time—the line “150,000,000 years ago” contrasting sharply with “400 years ago,” the opening line of the second stanza—the poem's third stanza shuttles readers from the Jurassic period back to the present day, and more deeply complicates dichotomies between “real” and “artificial” trees and landscapes: 150,000,000 years ago somewhere in a valley during the Jurassic period one dinosaur drowned in a swamp the magic of time turned it into a fossil the mysteries of God turned it into plastic trees

adorned Tokyo New Town Page 377 → dropping not a single leaf green forever 113 Plastic trees whose leaves never fade or fall are revealed as more “natural” than generally is assumed. In fact, Sakaki's poem asserts, through the magic of time and the mysteries of a heavenly power they are transmutations of dinosaurs, tangible reconfigurations of a long-extinct animal. Interestingly, “Green Forever” removes people from this process. Common sense dictates that it was people, or at least a deity working through people, who turned disintegrated fossils into green plastic. But certainly it is people who adorn their streets with these creations. Similarly, although the third stanza exposes the “natural” origins of “artificial” bodies, subsequent stanzas do not speak explicitly of the “artificial” origins of “natural bodies.” Instead, dramatically broadening the spatial scope of the poem, and for the first time depicting trees growing outside spaces inhabited by people, “Green Forever” continues with two verses on evergreens growing everywhere from southern Japan to the Sierra Nevada. These are trees that date back thousands of years and that long have inspired great devotion: Hot dry wind east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near the summit of White Mountain bristlecone Japanese white pine of 4,000 years worshiping praying singing summer tomorrow Born in the Jmon raised in the Kuroshio current typhoon treetops the Japanese cryptomeria worshipping 7,200 years under that umbrella dreams link [yume musubu] sign of rain bewitching spring evening114 The poem includes as examples of “real” trees the bristlecone pine, which can survive for nearly 5,000 years, longer than any other living organism; as well as the Japanese white pine, one of the characteristic trees of Japan's subalpine areas and a species that covered much of Honshu (Japan's largest island) during the Pleistocene (2.6 million–10,050 B.C.E.); and the Japanese cryptomeria, which also can live for thousands of years, growing as high as seventy meters and sporting trunks up to four meters in girth.115 The references to Japan's Jmon period (10,000–300 B.C.E.) and to cryptomeria recall the Jmon Sugi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Yakushima island Page 378 →(south of Kyushu) and at 2,000 years old Japan's most ancient cryptomeria (volcanic eruptions in the region make it doubtful that the tree predates the Common Era; it is most likely from Japan's Yayoi period, 300 B.C.E.–250 C. E.). Sakaki's poem exaggerates the endurance of Japanese cryptomeria but rightly emphasizes the connections of these and other trees to the landscape via such phrases as “dreams link” and references to people worshiping, praying, and singing beneath them. Indeed, the lives of these trees are not entirely independent of people. “Green Forever” juxtaposes the bristlecone, native to the Sierra Nevada, and the Japanese white pine, native to Japan. This would be of little consequence beyond expanding the scope of Sakaki's text were it not for the implication that the Japanese white pine has also been spotted near the summit of White Mountain (the highest summit in the White Mountain Range, east of the Sierra Nevada), somewhere it could be only if it had been transplanted there. “Green Forever” is ambiguous

concerning the location of the Japanese white pine. The text at once suggests that the tree is in the White Mountains and that it has been growing in Japan for 4,000 years. The latter option is more likely, but the placement of the reference to the Japanese white pine is a reminder of the manipulation of even the most ancient flora. And it is likely no coincidence that both the Japanese white pine and cryptomeria are popular in bonsai, one of the most “artificial” renderings of “natural” trees. “Green Forever” also highlights the close emotional and spiritual relationships people have with these trees, which are respected, indeed worshipped. There is no mention of their coloring. On the other hand, these organisms are capable of living for centuries, if not millennia, so their green is enduring, but unlike the green of the poem's title, it is not everlasting.116 Disparities between nonhuman bodies and human cultural artifacts, undermined in the third stanza, are reinforced in the fourth and fifth stanzas. Even though the plastic green of Tama New Town's plazas originated in a long-extinct animal and in that sense is millions of years older than even the planet's most ancient trees, the fourth and fifth stanzas emphasize that these transportable green constructs simply cannot compare with their much more massive organic counterparts. Yet once again matters are complicated, this time by the poem's final four lines: Today from a sunspot grows up [nobiagaru]117 a single young tree green forever 118 Page 379 → It is unclear whether this tree, allegeded to spring from a sunspot, is a “genuine” nonhuman body or whether it is as plastic as the trees in Tokyo's Tama New Town. But regardless, its future is imperiled, the sun even less hospitable to trees than industrialized earth. Much environmental discourse highlights human contamination of landscapes; many narratives stress or at least imply that virtually no part of the nonhuman is entirely unaffected by human behaviors, so that there is something “artificial” about even the most “natural” of organisms. “Green Forever” takes the opposite approach, arguing that boundaries between nonhuman bodies and human cultural products blur at least in part because of the nonhuman origins of the latter. What is perceived to be entirely artificial in fact comes from “nature,” however indirectly. This is a powerful statement for a text written by so committed an environmentalist as Sakaki. To be sure, the poem does not argue that the nonhuman origins of plastic justify its proliferation. But it does encourage readers to think more deeply about how resources are utilized. Juxtaposing plastic trees in public squares with ancient pines in wondrous old-growth forests, “Green Forever” points to the potential absurdity of using fossil fuels to create replicas of organic trees simply because the latter seem to require additional maintenance when integrated into the built environment. While encouraging more flexible understandings both of nature and of human creations, the indistinctness of the final stanza likewise suggests what can happen when people become too inured either to the nonhuman or to its replicas: they see only shape and color and ponder neither origins nor how the natural world has been manipulated. Gone are the days when belching smokestacks and other obvious environmental antagonists were deemed beautiful. Many landscapes are or give the illusion of being even greener now, at least in color, than ever before. But in most cases efforts to downplay or deny ecodegradation only encourage further destruction of environments. Illusions and delusions rising from conflicts between perception and actuality, and between image and reality, characterize many human interactions with nature and are staples of literature on environmental degradation. Further exposing the paradox of green are disjunctions between perceptions and behaviors, a crucial topic at the intellectual heart of ecoambiguity that forms the subject of Chapter 7.

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SEVEN / Green Paradoxes One of the oddities of people's interactions with their surroundings is that individuals who love, respect, or show fascination with nature often contribute, deliberately or inadvertently, to damaging or destroying it. Navajo spiritual guides have claimed that “digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium…is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.” Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about one hundred Navajo healers, has put it more bluntly: “As medicine people, we don't extract resources.”1 And yet coal and uranium mining, the latter banned on their lands only in 2005, have for decades sustained the Navajo economy. The consequences have long been apparent—mining and power plant emissions have dirtied the waters and dulled the skies of their reservations—but only recently has the Navajo Nation made sustained calls to heal environments. In “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule” (2010) the contemporary American poet Lucille Lang Day amplifies this paradox: “We built enough nuclear bombs to incinerate or irradiate all life and fill the atmosphere with ash /…As we burned fossil fuels / to run our factories and cut down forests / to build our towering cities, the Earth / grew warmer, the air turned grayer, / and the polar ice caps crumbled into the sea. / One by one, flowers, frogs, worms, and birds / began to disappear. It may sound strange, but most people cared deeply about the planet / and each other.”2 It does sound strange, but as the speaker of “Letter to Send” suggests by talking about “people” and by introducing herself simply as someone who “lived on the third planet circling an ordinary star,” these ambiguities characterize the relationships of many human cultures with the nonhuman.3 Environmental degradation would be difficult enough to contain if the attitudes propelling it were entirely and obviously ecophobic. But damage to landscapes is even harder to prevent and remediate because people's basic sympathy toward the nonhuman regularly accompanies behaviors that unleash (un)expected harm. Whether propagated by governments or private organizations, popular environmental discourse often underscores the need to respect other species, develop closer ties to the nonhuman, even learn to Page 381 →“love nature,” on the assumption that such approaches will promote environmental health. Sometimes these attitudes translate directly into actions that benefit the planet's ecosystems. Yet many literary works argue that little prevents well-meaning individuals and even proclaimed environmentalists from acting in ways that harm ecosystems. The Chinese writer Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem (2004) depicts this dynamic most clearly, featuring an animal that is denied freedom, even life, by the very individual who adores it; Chen Zhen imprisons and ultimately kills the wolf to which he has become deeply attached. Chapter 5 discussed how Wolf Totem shows human abuse of the environment accelerating even in the face of easily predicted and highly undesired consequences. The present chapter is concerned less with conflicts between conditions and behaviors than with gaps between attitudes and behaviors, especially the phenomenon of loving nature to death. Like most texts treating the relationships between indigenous peoples and their environments, Wolf Totem offers examples of people (Mongols) with great respect for animals who nevertheless occasionally kill them somewhat gratuitously. More significant in this novel is the ambiguous relationship of an outsider with one of the grassland's animals. Unlike most Han Chinese, who openly detest wolves, Chen Zhen is fascinated by them. Averting a wolf attack not long after his arrival on the Inner Mongolian grasslands, and fascinated by the orderly retreat of the animals, he “fell under their spell, experiencing a combination of fear, reverence, awe, infatuation, and obsession toward the wolves of [this region]. For him the Mongolian wolf was not at all a living thing that merely had touched his soul. Instead, it was a living thing that had already struck his soul.”4 His soul not just touched, but struck (jue bu shi jinjin chuji le ta de linghun, er shi cengjing jichu le ta de linghun de shengwu), Chen Zhen is completely mesmerized and wonders how the animal can exert such a powerful pull over him (ruci juda de xiyinli). One night during his first winter on the grasslands, after watching a dramatic struggle between a wolf and domestic animals plus their human owners, he decides to learn as much as he can about these impressive creatures and imagines raising one himself. He finds the perfect opportunity during his second year in Inner Mongolia when he and his friends raid a wolf den and bring home seven pups. Finally holding a wolf, Chen Zhen declares the animal “the most noble, the most valuable, and the most beautiful small life on the Mongolian grassland.”5 He decides to keep

the strongest pup for himself and raise it to adulthood. Chen Zhen is aware of some of the many contradictions between his feelings toward the wolves and his treatment of them. He truly admires the animals and hopes that increased contact with wolves will lead to greater understanding of them. Page 382 →But the compromises begin with kidnapping the litter. As he walks home, Chen Zhen recognizes that he has irrevocably changed multiple nonhuman lives and fears that wolves, led by the mother of the captured pups, will haunt him forever. The imagined reaction of the wolves awakens him to the prospect that he has “committed a big mistake.”6 Chen Zhen first blames his friends for absconding with an entire litter, claiming there would have been nothing wrong with his simply taking the largest and the strongest of the seven. But he quickly admits that even if he had acted alone the outcome probably would have been the same: “Stealing a litter of wolf pups represented victory, courage, profit. It brought him honor and made others treat him with increased respect. Compared to this, the seven small lives were as lightweight as grains of sand [xiao shengming jiu shi shali yiyang jing de fama le].”7 Chen Zhen's attitudinal conflict is conspicuous: he believes wolves noble and beautiful while also deeming them insignificant, and as plentiful and interchangeable as particles of sand; the comparison with sand is ironic considering that the more damage Chinese inflict on the grasslands, the more this sere substance replaces wolves. But of even greater importance is the disjuncture between Chen Zhen's reverence for the animals and his mistreatment of them. This conflict only intensifies after the young men return home. Chen Zhen and his friend Daoerji each decide to adopt a pup, leaving the future of the remaining five uncertain. Chen Zhen briefly contemplates raising all seven to adulthood, the narrator noting that the young man's feelings toward wolves have intensified from delight to obsession. Recognizing that he cannot possibly rear the entire litter, Chen Zhen considers returning the five the young men cannot keep but decides that this too would be unfeasible. The thought process is revealing: An idea suddenly flashed in his mind. Why not get back on his horse and return the remaining five pups to their den? But with the exception of Yang Ke, there was no one to go with him, and he didn't dare go alone. Neither he nor his horses had the strength to endure the round trip, which would total more than four hours. At that moment the mother wolf was certainly crying, utterly despondent, howling madly beside her damaged den. If he were to return now, wouldn't that be tantamount to looking for death?8 Chen Zhen is deeply attached to wolves. And he recognizes that his having kidnapped the pups has likely devastated their mother. But not only does he falsely claim himself and his horse too weak for the journey back to the den Page 383 →despite their having recently completed the trip. He also does not ask his friend Yang Ke, whom he asserts is the only one who might make the journey with him, whether Yang would be willing to help him return the wolves. To be sure, Chen Zhen declares that revisiting the den would be suicidal, but coming when it does, this statement appears to be almost an excuse to rationalize his cowardice. And so they decide that Daoerji will kill the unclaimed pups, while Chen Zhen sighs deeply, “There's no other way [zhi neng zheiyang le].”9 Watching the murder of the first wolf is almost more than he can tolerate: “It was as though Chen Zhen's heart had fallen from his throat back into his chest. The pain was devoid of consciousness.”10 But still he does nothing. The narrative makes it clear that despite his protests to the contrary, there of course are options—Chen Zhen could have left the pups in their den in the first place, or, recognizing his mistake in separating them from their mother, he could have at least tried to convince Yang Ke to help him return them to their den. Yet his attraction to wolves in the abstract, combined with little thought about the well-being of individual wolves and then with simple cowardice, leads directly to the demise of five pups. The contradictions continue as Chen Zhen begins to raise his wolf. He knows from the outset that the Mongols will not approve of his keeping a wolf as a pet and understands the reasoning behind their censure, but he disregards their wisdom. He believes that raising the pup will help him and ultimately Han Chinese gain a deeper understanding of wolves; this will be no small accomplishment, since the Han Chinese allegedly have feared and tormented these animals for thousands of years. Yang Ke believes that there will be many benefits to raising this wolf: “It seems as though raising wolves will be good for more than just studying them. We also can study human nature [renxing], wolf nature [langxing], animal nature [shouxing], and domestication [jiachuxing]…It seems as

though our first day of doing this has yielded impressive results.”11 Chen Zhen's and Yang Ke's goals are noble. Yet their myopic hyperopia, their preoccupation with a distant future of understanding not only wolves, or even just wolves and people, but both animals and relationships between animals and people, blinds them to established knowledge and present conditions, knowledge and conditions that if not taken into consideration make the future they envision nearly impossible. Enthralled by his quickly growing pup, Chen Zhen refuses to listen to his Mongol friends. Citing both local tradition and Chinese law, they implore him to liberate the animal while it is still young enough to reestablish ties with wild wolves. Although initially enthusiastic about helping Chen Zhen raise the wolf, Yang Ke soon recognizes that this is not a viable enterprise. Yang Ke warns his friend that the Mongols are not the only ones who want Page 384 →him to relinquish the animal; in a rare moment of solidarity, the resident Han Chinese also want him to dispose of it. Yang Ke expresses dismay at the inhumanity of Chen Zhen's treatment of the pup: “I’m not afraid of the responsibility. It's just that it's too pitiful to see this little wolf tied up with shackles all day long like a little prisoner. The animal that most loves freedom is the wolf. But now not a moment goes by when this wolf is not in chains. Are you hardhearted enough to do this?…I can understand why father opposes your raising it. This truly blasphemes the gods!” Chen Zhen's heart was completely conflicted, but his words remained unyielding…“How could I not think of freeing the wolf and letting it return to the mountains? But I can't release it now. There are still too many things that haven't been made clear. The freedom of one little wolf is the freedom of a single wolf, but if in the future the grasslands are home to not even a single wolf, of what sort of freedom could we then speak? If that were to happen, you also would regret it.”12 Likening the chained wolf to a prisoner and disturbed by what he sees, Yang Ke declares pitiful (tai kelian le) the spectacle of this incarcerated animal. More significant, he observes that wolves love freedom (ai ziyou) more than any other animal, making Chen Zhen's treatment of this creature especially blasphemous (zhei zhen shi xiedu shenling a). Chen Zhen's heart is completely torn (xinli shifen maodun); although their circumstances differ, like the elephant keeper in Murakami's “The Elephant's Disappearance,” discussed below, he keeps shackled an animal he greatly admires and imagines would be more content if permitted to run free. His rhetoric is grand and his aspirations lofty, yet his behaviors are anything but. Facilitating this gap between attitudes and actions is a gulf between beliefs and evidence, in Chen Zhen's case the delusion that imprisoning this single wolf will grant him sufficient insights into wolves to change people's behaviors toward them and ensure wolf populations freedom for years to come. He is correct in asserting that if in the future the grasslands were wiped clean of wolves the “freedom” of a single animal, something with which Yang Ke is deeply concerned, no longer would be germane. But there is no evidence that keeping the captured pup in shackles will allow Chen Zhen to understand its true nature, much less the true nature of wolves. On the contrary, there is considerable likelihood of the opposite: keeping a wolf in captivity, particularly under the conditions favored by Chen Zhen, likely will teach him far less about wolves in their “natural” state than about how they Page 385 →react to internment. This, paradoxically, is the opposite of what Chen Zhen seeks to accomplish. With time, keeping the wolf becomes downright dangerous for both the animal and the Mongols. But even when the cub learns to howl and its cries, heard by wolves in the surrounding hills, put the village in jeopardy, Chen Zhen does not relent. To be sure, the wolf comes to enjoy spending time with its Chinese captor: “Whenever the little wolf heard Chen Zhen calling ‘Little Wolf,’ it happily ran over to him, was very much attached to him [gen ta qinre], licked his hand, rubbed up against his knees, pounced on his stomach, even lay on the ground, opened up its legs, exposed its belly, and let Chen Zhen scratch it.”13 And when Chen Zhen returns home in the evening the wolf, having missed him (xiang ta), welcomes him warmly, its howls of old “utterly distant” (shifen yaoyuan).14 Affection here goes both ways. But this harmony is short-lived. Just several lines after declaring the cries of the wolves nearly forgotten, the

narrator abruptly declares, “Bears can be led [qian], tigers can be led, lions can be led, elephants too can be led. The Mongolian wolf cannot be led.”15 This is a lesson Chen Zhen learns firsthand. The wolf refuses to accompany him to his new camp; the more Chen Zhen pulls its chain, the more the animal growls and digs in its heels, not surrendering until it has lost half the fur on its bleeding neck, rubbed raw its paws, and blunted its claws. Chen Zhen's tears at this sight are said to “drip [di] into the wolf's blood,” a very different form of intimacy than the two have previously enjoyed.16 Despite everything, Chen Zhen still hopes for a bright future, confessing to Yang Ke that he had dreamed of having a “genuine wild wolf friend” (zhenzheng de yelang pengyou) that would frolic with him in the grasslands, but that now he hopes to give the cub new teeth and free him in the mountains of Outer Mongolia. Yang Ke chastises him for harboring such idle fantasies and urges him to face reality (miandui xianshi). And soon it becomes impossible not to do so. The larger the wolf grows, the more frustrated it becomes with its chain, pulling and yanking it so desperately that it seems “the wolf wouldn't stop until it attained his goal, and wouldn't hesitate to strangle itself to death [jihu buxi ba ziji lesi].”17 Even though the wolf continues to fight its captivity and its injuries become increasingly severe, even though Chen Zhen admits he knows just how cruel it is to imprison this animal, he refuses to release it into the wild, claiming that to do so would be lethal. He believes death in captivity preferable to dying in the wild. Rather than give the animal even a moment of freedom, Chen Zhen keeps it imprisoned to the bitter end, until finally, after enjoying one last moment together, he has no choice but to kill the animal he had hoped to “raise to old age”: Page 386 → Chen Zhen fell to the ground in total despair…Bloody saliva dripped from the wolf's mouth, and he looked at Chen Zhen like an older wolf, as though he wanted to say something to him…Tears rained down Chen Zhen's face. He embraced the pup's neck and one last time touched its forehead and nose closely against his own… Chen Zhen suddenly stood up, ran to the side of the yurt, and quietly grasped a spade with a broken handle. He turned his body, holding the spade behind him, and ran back to the pup, which was still sitting there panting hard, its legs shaking even more terribly. Chen Zhen hurriedly stepped behind him, raised the spade, and, using all his strength, smashed the back of the wolf's skull, by his neck [hounao]. The wolf didn't make a sound, softly falling to the ground, like a true Mongolian grassland wolf [zhenzheng de menggu caoyuan lang], holding out until the very end······ At that moment Chen Zhen felt as though his soul had been knocked out of him. He seemed to hear again the clanking sound of his soul rushing out of the top of his head. This time it seemed as though the soul that flew out would never again return.18 The narrator accentuates the increasingly close bond between man and wolf—the two first enjoy friendly physical contact (licking hands, rubbing knees, scratching and pouncing on stomachs), then they mix bodily fluids (blood and tears), and finally they entangle souls, as both are destroyed. But even more important, Wolf Totem shows Chen Zhen's intoxication with wolves and insistence on understanding these animals coming at the expense of their well-being; the man who had described his soul as being struck (jichu) by this animal himself strikes it to death. His acts have consequences just as deadly, albeit on a much smaller scale, as the Han Chinese invasion of Inner Mongolia. As discussed in Chapter 5, Jiang Rong's novel highlights the trauma that can result from behaviors that defy transmitted knowledge and indisputable evidence. Even more striking in the case of Chen Zhen is the disparity between attitudes and the impacts of behaviors: Chen Zhen literally loves an animal to death. Chen Zhen and Yang Ke are not the only individuals in Wolf Totem whose attitudes and behaviors conflict. In the case of the Mongols, who both revere and kill wolves, these disjunctions stem largely from disparities in wolf behaviors. The Mongols revere wolves because the animals help maintain grassland ecosystems, but they kill

them because the animals mercilessly slaughter the Mongols’ animals. As one of the Mongol elders reminds Chen Zhen, wolves are not to be killed en masse, but they in turn cannot be allowed Page 387 →to kill indiscriminately: “The grassland is a battlefield…Doesn't it distress you that the wolves used deception to kill a large group of horses? If we don't use violent means, how will we ever match them?”19 Similarly, when Chen Zhen refuses to help kill the wolf cubs they have decided not to raise, the Mongol Daoerji appears to misunderstand his motives and mocks what he perceives to be another example of Han Chinese contradiction: “You Han Chinese have no courage. You really hate wolves, but you don't dare kill even a cub.”20 Yet in this instance the real contradiction lies within Daoerji. Jiang Rong's novel depicts Han Chinese as having for centuries both hated wolves and killed them wholesale. Daoerji, on the other hand, is concerned with the health of the same wolf pups that moments later he delights in killing. When Chen Zhen asks him to postpone for several days the death of the five wolf pups they have decided to kill, Daoerji asks what he plans to feed them in the interim, noting that they all will quickly die if they do not receive proper nourishment. He has no qualms about ending the lives of wolves himself, but he does not want to see them starve to death, however quickly. Not surprisingly, concern with the well-being of the wolves evaporates when Daoerji is given the all clear to kill the pups. The exhilaration he experiences at slaughtering the young animals is noteworthy: The more Daoerji killed, the more excited he became, repeating [as he threw the animals into the air], “Up to [the deity] Tenggeli [Tengri] you go, up there you’ll enjoy a life of ease and comfort”…Five pitiful little wolf pups flew through the air, and five blood-drenched bodies fell to the earth. Chen Zhen swept all five dead pups into a dustpan and then looked up into the clouds and the sky for a long time, hoping that Tenggeli had accepted their souls. Daoerji seemed to be utterly enjoying himself…He said, “There aren't many opportunities to kill five wolves in a single day. People fall far short of wolves. If a fierce wolf has a chance, it will kill a hundred, or even two hundred sheep at a time. What does it matter that I killed five wolves. It's getting late; I have to get my cattle home.” After he finished speaking, he went over to pick up his [living] wolf pup.21 This scene incorporates all manner of contradictions, including those between actions (Daoerji simultaneously tosses animals to their deaths and tells them that he hopes they will enjoy a peaceful life post mortem; he kills some animals and spares others) and those between attitudes (Daoerji believes wolves in general are a vital presence on the grasslands but thinks there is nothing wrong with killing five pups). Aspects of these contradictions are Page 388 →understandable. Contrasting what Mongols do to wolves with what wolves do to domesticated animals and the Mongols who depend on them, the text makes a good case for the insignificance of Daoerji's murder of the five pups. More complex are other relationships between attitudes and behaviors. On the one hand, Daoerji kills individuals from the same species that he greatly respects. On the other hand, his anger at wolves for decimating domesticated animal populations coincides not only with his delight at killing these animals (attitudinal harmony) but on an even more basic level with the act of killing these animals in the first place (congruence between attitudes and behaviors). In the case of Daoerji and Mongols more generally, conflicts between particular attitudes and behaviors are mitigated by the convergence of the two in other arenas. The same cannot be said of the conflicts between attitudes and behaviors exhibited by Chen Zhen, whose great attachment to the wolf pup and even greater adherence to promoting his own agenda result in the death of this animal. There is no question of his great respect for wolves as an abstract concept and even as an actual species, but relationships with individual wolves prove far more complicated. Fascination with animals not only coexists with but also frequently results in damaging them.22 Admiration and even deep respect for the nonhuman can translate into actions that benefit or at least do not notably damage environments, but such attitudes also can camouflage outlooks that trigger behaviors harmful to the nonhuman world. This chapter analyzes how creative works negotiate relationships between environmental degradation on the one hand and these conflicts of attitudes and actions on the other.23 I begin with literary texts that, like Wolf Totem, implicate human fascination with specific nonhuman entities as largely responsible for their degradation. Such narratives often contrast the attitudes of characters who respect the nonhuman with those who care little about environmental health, yet depict both as damaging ecosystems. The second section investigates

texts that mediate attachment not to a single nonhuman being, or a small group of such beings, but instead to larger ecosystems. These creative works show admiration for the nonhuman as launching behaviors that shape it in largely detrimental ways. The third and final section examines texts featuring individuals whose worries about environmental harm translate into attempts not to remediate but instead to distance themselves from it, even by relocating to another planet. These creative works highlight the lengths to which some of the most environmentally aware persons will go to avoid having to confront spaces in ecological decline. The chapter concludes by discussing some of literature's most scathing parodies of environmental movements: texts that engage with extremes— Page 389 →extraterrestrial environmentalists penalizing a nation for destroying forests around the world by stripping this nation of its trees, and the megalomaniacal leader of a green movement intent not on improving environments but instead on increasing his own personal glory, regardless of the ecological cost. Although fantastical, these writings powerfully attack the failings, hypocrisy, and malevolence of those who protest environmental damage. Together, the works examined in this chapter reveal some of the limits and perils of environmental attitudes and rhetoric, particularly their unexpected role in enabling damage to ecosystems. But far from suggesting that individuals and societies abandon environmentalism, these texts confirm its strengths and highlight its promise, if pursued more energetically and with greater awareness of potentially harmful effects on ecosystems.

Injurious Fascination While Jiang Rong's novel Wolf Totem features a young man who kills the very animal he loves, the Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming's “Set Free” (1987) depicts an older man who harms an animal whose heart beats in tandem with his own. Both men imprison animals to fulfill emotional needs. Ironically, Chen Zhen is much more concerned with the well-being of his wolf than the aging Awei is with his egret, but the egret is liberated whereas the wolf endures a prolonged death. As discussed in Chapter 2, “Set Free” centers around a couple—Jinzu and Awei—who live in a small town that has been subjected to years of paralyzing contamination; their son has been imprisoned for protesting the destruction of the region's soil, water, and skies. Even so, Jinzu and Awei resent new government policies that designate their land a conservation area in order to remediate pollution. The protected status virtually guarantees an influx of birds, and since the couple is prohibited from catching those that feast on their fields, they almost certainly will go bankrupt. “Set Free” highlights the conflicting attitudes of family farmers and fishers toward conservation laws; Chapter 2 demonstrates how in this story even individuals with the deepest attachments to ecologically ravaged spaces paradoxically believe they should be allowed to use these spaces as best suits them personally, with little regard for environmental health. In this chapter I am more interested in the gap between individual attitudes and actual treatments of the nonhuman. Although believing corporations have no right to degrade environments, Awei himself purposely disrupts a bird's life; despite believing that the government has no right to imprison his son Wentong, Awei imprisons an animal. To be sure, Huang Chunming's Page 390 →story nowhere suggests that the changes townspeople such as Awei inflict on their surroundings even remotely approach the effects of the upstream cement factories and chemical plants that have poisoned the land and water near their homes. Nor does it imply that Awei's mistreatment of the bird is anything like the government's mistreatment of his son. But Awei's obsession with catching and holding an egret hostage, the text's principal subplot, is an excellent example of the conflicts that frequently exist between attitudes and actions. With outlooks on the natural world so contradictory, it is almost inevitable that some will conflict with behaviors and that the nonhuman will remain in jeopardy. The title “Set Free” refers to events narrated in the final pages of the story: the emancipation of people and the nonhuman from the ravages of pollution, of Awei's son Wentong from prison, and of an egret Awei caught several days before his son's release. Awei's fixation on egrets dates back several decades. Thirty years earlier, he had captured one for his young son Wentong, who adored the bird and was crushed when it escaped. But preoccupied with a birthing sow, Awei had shown his son little sympathy. Instead, pulling the bawling Wentong away from the pig, he had ripped his son's arm out of its socket, something for which he had never forgiven himself. To make amends, Awei has been trying for some time to catch another egret, but without success. Seeing the egret in a paddy many years later awakens old feelings, and he feels compelled to snare the animal and bring it home. “Set Free” at first suggests that Awei is rescuing a poisoned bird that has become trapped in the mud.24 Early in

the story the narrator comments: As Awei was hurrying along the field ridge, he startled a bird that had ingested some recently sprayed snail pesticide. Flapping its wings, rocking from side to side, the bird fled from the ridge and headed toward the newly planted rice shoots. “An egret!” the old man shouted joyously. Forgetting about the rain, he set off in pursuit…The egret desperately flapped its wings but couldn't fly away. In the end, its wings were stuck to the surface of the water, and it couldn't even rise up, couldn't even run.25 Initially, both Awei's legs and the egret's wings move speedily, but while Awei sets off in hot pursuit (zhizhui), the bird is immobilized. And it quickly becomes clear that Awei's priority is capturing, not freeing, the animal. Fearing that the egret will fly away just as he is about to grab it, Awei makes a final desperate dive for the animal, falling face first into the muddy water and making a spectacle of himself. Furthermore, rather than freeing the egret Page 391 →from the mud and determining whether it can manage on its own, Awei grasps it tightly. The narrator notes that Awei does so even though he would have harshly scolded any child he saw attempting the same thing. Indeed, until this episode Awei gives every indication of believing that unless they are harming crops, birds, like people, should not be deprived of freedom. For instance, after visiting his son in prison Awei spotted an egret startled by an aging, backfiring bus. He watched the bird run along a nearby levee and then take flight, soaring into the distance over waves of rice plants until it was just a single black dot. There was no thought of chasing after the bird. Instead, Awei imagined himself becoming another black dot and disappearing into the wind, perhaps anticipating Chen Huang's Pigeon Tuoli, discussed in Chapter 4. Walking into town, Awei saw another egret, this time flying out of flowers bordering a ditch. Once again, he followed it with his eyes until it nearly disappeared. Yet his “primal impulse” (yuanshi chongdong), something he claims to have lost long ago, returns with a vengeance while hurrying along the dike, so he captures and needlessly imprisons an egret. The complexities described here pose an ecological contradiction: Awei empathizes with birds when he sees them fly off into the distance but when one is closer at hand he captures it. Conflicts between attitudes and actions continue. Awei senses an immediate connection with the egret, noting that its nervous, thumping heartbeat is synchronized perfectly with his own (he cike laorenjia de xintiao, huxiang huying er pengpeng zuoxiang).26 His heart gushing with both guilt and joy, he feels great compassion for the bird; he talks to himself about its capture with such kindness that listening to his own voice makes him believe the trembling animal in his hands is a real treasure. But compassion and empathy here translate into imprisonment, not freedom. Rather than liberate the bird, Awei takes it home. His wife is clearly baffled by his behaviors, which contradict not only his own feelings toward the animal but also those of his community. Egrets, she reminds him, are not eaten even during famines, nor do people raise them as pets. “Set Free” highlights Awei's selfishness, depicting him as assuaging his own guilt toward his son and fulfilling his own emotional desires, not assisting a poisoned bird.27 Awei's emotional attachment to the animal likewise does not prevent him from harming it. Still strong when it arrives at Awei's home, the bird struggles mightily to spring free of its captor as he stands in the doorway being chastised by his wife Jinzu. Awei must grasp the bird tightly to prevent it from flying off. He recognizes that capturing and detaining the egret would be justified only if he were nursing it back to health, so he weakens the bird, keeping it in a chicken cage for three days and then claiming that the reason it Page 392 →cannot stand up is that the effects of pesticides the bird ingested have not yet worn off. But Jinzu is not persuaded, believing that the bird's weakness stems not from ingesting pesticides but rather from going for days without eating fish; unsaid yet implied is that this lack of fish is as much Awei's responsibility (for not feeding the bird) as it is the fault of the factories and the farmers (for so polluting the waters that they no longer support fish). Pressured by his wife, Awei improves the egret's diet. The animal rapidly recovers and once again begins flapping its wings, “fancying itself circling in the air.” Far from delighted at this turn of events, Awei states simply: “It's not going to die. Now I’m worried that it will fly away, not that it will die” (bu hui si le. xianzai shi pa ta feidiao, cai bu shi pa ta si).28 So he keeps the bird in a cage, where it spends its time strutting around. The same individual angry with the authorities for holding his son for protesting environmental degradation consciously deprives an animal of its freedom and worries aloud that the bird might escape. Huang Chunming's story here points to the selfishness that often creates conflicts between attitudes and behaviors. Ideally, distress over his son's imprisonment would increase Awei's

sensitivity toward the confinement of other human/nonhuman bodies, but instead he thinks only of himself, seizing and keeping captive a bird that reminds him of his son. One evening, frustrated that his son has not yet been released from prison, Awei suddenly decides to set the bird free. By this time it has been imprisoned for so long that it does not quite know what to do when Awei opens its cage. Awei has to take the bird in his hands and launch it into the air; as with egrets in the past, Awei watches this bird fly off until it is nothing more than a black dot far in the distance. Attitudes and behaviors here coincide. Yet when Wentong finally returns home, Awei grows disappointed that he has freed the bird. Revealing his still powerful desire to restrain this animal, he declares, “[Wentong] if you’d come a bit earlier, I wouldn't have released the egret.”29 The next, and final line of the story finds Jinzu watching Awei and Wentong while chanting silently “Praise be to Amitbha Buddha” , a mantra from the Pure Land school that in Chinese Buddhism is used during meditation to help clear the mind. Her husband appears to have learned little from his son's imprisonment, so Jinzu needs as much fortitude as possible. “Set Free” concludes with the concurrent freeing of a man from prison, of a bird from a cage, and, more generally, of both people and the environment from the ravages of pollution. These events suggest the beginnings of new human/nonhuman relationships. They also contrast with the relative stability of relations between people and their governments; the lives of the residents of Dakenggu will not become any less regulated by official decrees. Huang Chunming's story here comments on Taiwan's own shift—on July Page 393 →14, 1987, just two months before the serialization of “Set Free” (September 12–15, 1987)—from a society under martial law to one regulated by a stringent national security law, a move that in some ways changed everything, and in some ways changed very little. On the other hand, the differences between the changes in human/nonhuman relationships and the changes in government/civilian relationships likely are not as great as they first appear. A conservation area is being established, and Tianying tells Awei and Jinzu that the factories “won't be allowed to dump poisoned water.”30 But while the former waste site turned conservation area might be off-limits, nothing is said about prohibiting factories from releasing poisoned water elsewhere or emitting pollutants into the atmosphere. Nor is there any indication of how pesticide use will be affected, so possibly farmers will resort to killing birds clandestinely. Much thus remains unanswered. Are people and animals set free from one prison only to be herded into another, possibly more dangerous space? The initial prisons were readily identifiable—Wentong is in an actual jail, Awei keeps the egret in a chicken cage, and the villagers and their environs are enshrouded by unbreathable air. The shape of future prisons probably will not be so clearly apparent. Yet the story suggests that these spaces are potentially no less menacing. Broadening the focus of a caged animal's relationship with an individual to that of a town, and leaving uncertain the fate of this animal, the Japanese writer Murakami Haruki's short story “Z no shmetsu” (The Elephant's Disappearance, 1985) depicts trying to safeguard an elephant as actually harming it and perhaps even bringing about its death. Contemporary Japan's best-known and most frequently translated creative writer, Murakami has consistently emphasized writers’ social responsibility.31 In his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech (2009) he declared, “I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and to shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them.”32 In “The Elephant's Disappearance” Murakami depicts a System that has literally entangled animals within its grip, a society where fascination with animals is at least partially responsible for their death. This story does not expose nearly the degree of elephant abuse found in other works of world literature, but the contrasts it posits between fascination with and treatment of this animal are significant in their reminder of the diverse sources of nonhuman suffering.33 “The Elephant's Disappearance” opens with its first-person narrator reading a newspaper article on the disappearance of an elderly elephant from its pen near an elementary school in an unnamed affluent suburb of Tokyo.Page 394 → The narrator, who long has been interested in the elephant and was one of the last people to see it before it disappeared, summarizes events leading up to this incident. Born in East Africa, the animal had lived most of its life in a small private suburban zoo in Japan. When the zoo closed, its land was sold to a realestate developer and all the animals relocated except for the elephant, which no facility wanted because of its advanced age. Local bureaucrats agreed that they could not kill the animal since their constituents would be

outraged and the fallout substantial. So the town took ownership of it, the developer provided land, and the zoo's former owners continued to pay the wages of its keeper. An elementary school gymnasium was relocated and turned into an elephant house, dedication ceremonies were held, and the elephant began its new life. It was cared for lovingly by its keeper and visited frequently by schoolchildren, who gave it scraps from their lunches. Murakami's story describes how after a year in its new home the elephant suddenly disappears, along with its keeper. The authorities assert that the animal either “escaped or was snatched as the result of a clever and calculated plan.”34 The newspaper likewise claims that the animal “ran away.” But the narrator determines that, since people went to great lengths to make sure the animal could not escape, far more disturbing phenomena are at play: “A composite of complexities and labored rhetoric, the newspaper article left only one possible conclusion [essence; honshitsu] concerning the incident: the elephant had not run away, it had ‘disappeared.’”35 Later in “The Elephant's Disappearance,” recounting his conversation with a young woman he recently had begun to date, the narrator justifies his conclusion. The night the elephant disappeared he had been perched on a cliff, looking into the animal's dwelling through a vent he had recently discovered, when he noticed that the size difference between the animal and its keeper was not as dramatic as before. He initially thought the town might have replaced the elderly elephant with a younger and smaller counterpart, but the animal's movements and interactions with its keeper remained as they had always been, so he quickly dismissed this idea. His companion asks him whether he believes that the elephant continued shrinking until it was small enough to escape from its prison or whether the animal simply evaporated into nothingness. The narrator has no answer but nevertheless wraps up the story with “The elephant and its keeper have disappeared [shmetsu], and they will not be returning [modotte konai].”36 Murakami's story suggests that if even something so massive and so protected can vanish without a trace, then there is nothing preventing other human and nonhuman beings from a similar outcome; nothing is permanently safe, yet neither is anything permanently confined. But in discussingPage 395 → the extreme albeit futile measures taken to assure that what happened would never happen, “The Elephant's Disappearance” also underscores the fine line between protecting and imperiling the nonhuman. The animal's life is spared, it gets a new home, and its familiar caretaker is retained, but its movements are severely limited by physical restraints. Just as disturbing is the fact that no one, including those closest to the elephant, seems to protest its confinement. Fascination with the elephant is accompanied by silence over its shackles. The narrator describes the ceremony dedicating the elephant house: the mayor gives a speech on the town's growth and the perfection of its cultural facilities, a student reads an essay beseeching the elephant to live a long and healthy life, contestants vie to see who can best draw the elephant, and young women feed the elephant bananas, which it munches as its eyes glaze over. When it finishes, everyone applauds. Perhaps too intent on enjoying the festivities, people seem oblivious to the chains that bind the aging animal, captured in the narrator's iron-clad account: On its right rear leg the elephant was fitted with a massive, heavy-looking steel cuff. From this cuff there stretched a thick chain about thirty feet long. This in turn was fastened securely to a concrete foundation. Anyone could see what a solid steel cuff and chain these were. It appeared as though the elephant could struggle with all its might for a hundred years, and it still wouldn't be able to destroy them. I couldn't tell whether the elephant was bothered by its shackles. However, at least on the surface, it seemed completely unconcerned that a steel lump was coiled around its leg. It kept its blank gaze fixed on an indeterminate point in space; its ears and white body hairs trembled softly in the wind.37 Discourse on confinement becomes progressively stronger: on one of the elephant's legs is a “massive, heavylooking steel cuff” (gasshiri to shita omos na tetsu no wa o hamerareteita). This cuff is connected to a “thick chain” (futoi kusari), albeit one that is thirty feet long. But this glimmer of hope is quickly shattered, the chain attached “securely” (kotei) to a “concrete foundation” (konkurto no dodai). The narrator then reinforces the reinforcements, noting that everyone can see clearly that the cuff and chain are solid (ganj), indestructible steel.

This passage contrasts sharply with the description of the elephant-house dedication festivities. While the ceremonies feature an animal chomping on bananas as schoolchildren and officials celebrate, this passage portrays an animal bound and tethered. Only its ears and white hairs move; even its gaze Page 396 →is said to be steadfast. Interestingly, the narrator admits he cannot tell (boku ni wa yoku wakaranai) whether the elephant is bothered by its shackles, then comments that—the antithesis of Chen Zhen's wolf—the animal seems completely unconcerned (kanshin o haratte inai y ni mieta). At once pointedly denying any visible signs of nonhuman suffering, this admission and comment leave considerable room for speculation and reveal the narrator's doubts that the elephant remains unaffected by its constraints. Later in the story, in remarks on the newspaper article about the elephant's disappearance, the narrator reveals that the massive leg iron was only the beginning. And he tries to explain how it would have been impossible for the elephant simply to “escape,” given the many barriers that were erected around the animal. The iron cuff was discovered still bolted; the newspaper says that the most logical explanation is that the caretaker unlocked it, freed the elephant's leg, then relocked it. But the narrator notes that this would have been impossible. The caretaker did not have a key for the cuff; the keys had been housed in safes at the police station and the fire station, so there was no opportunity for the caretaker even to allow the elephant an occasional clandestine stroll. The narrator also notes the virtual lack of an escape path from the elephant's pen. To be sure, the elephant arrived at this site via trailer and thus presumably could have been taken away in similar fashion by someone who had access to the key, an option the narrator does not consider. Instead, he comments on the extensive security surrounding the animal's house and grounds: The second problem was the escape route. The elephant house and elephant grounds were surrounded by a solid fence about ten feet tall. The question of security had been passionately debated in the town council, and the town had settled on a patrol system that might be considered rather excessive for a single old elephant. The fence was made of concrete and thick iron bars…there was only a single entrance, which was found locked from the inside. There was no way the elephant could have gotten over that fortress-like fence and escaped.38 Not only is the elephant excessively tethered to a building, the building itself is surrounded by a high fence that is “solid” (ganj) like the steel of the animal's tethers, a fence worthy of a fortress (ysai), not an animal pen. Moreover, as the narrator reveals, the elephant enclosure is located at the base of a steep hill that the animal could not possibly have climbed. And no footprints were ever found, confirming that the elephant did not walk outside its pen. Ironically, security around the elephant enclosure becomes even tighter afterPage 397 → its disappearance. As the narrator comments, “A thick chain had been coiled around the bars of the entrance to the iron fence. This was to keep people out. Looking inside the fence, I could see that the door of the elephant house had been chained in similar fashion…The chain coiled around the door of the elephant house made me think of a large snake tightly guarding a rusted, ruined palace in a dense forest.”39 The authorities had spared the elephant's life, but not because they harbored any real concern for the animal. Instead, they focused solely on avoiding a public outcry. While initial public sentiment allowed the elephant to live, soon popular opinion ensured its imprisonment. Residents were well disposed to having an elephant in their midst. As the narrator wryly notes: “Adopting a homeless elephant was something about which people could feel good. People feel more affection for old elephants than for sewers or fire engines.”40 People also recognized that the elephant was feeble: “The elephant was so old that its every move was a huge effort. It was so old that people seeing it for the first time feared it might fall down flat on the ground and take its final breath…It looked as though it might drop dead of a heart attack at any minute.”41 But as reactions to the elephant's disappearance reveal, some individuals still feared the animal. They thus did not object to the restraints and most likely were even in favor of them. At the same time that enthusiasm for the elephant preserved its life and immortalized it in image and verse, it also resulted in the animal's imprisonment. Even more significant than the contrast between the sentiments and behaviors of the townspeople is the paradox of the caretaker. The narrator describes the relationship between elephant and keeper as exceptionally close. They had an uncanny ability to communicate with each other: the caretaker needed only tap the elephant on the leg and whisper something in its ear for the animal to do exactly what he wanted. The narrator wonders whether the

elephant has learned to understand snippets of human language, reckoning that it has lived long enough to do so. Elephant and caretaker appear so close that the narrator even wonders whether the animal can read the mind of its human counterpart. When he asks the caretaker how he communicates with the elephant, the man responds simply, “It's been a long companionship.”42 This is the public face of the two. Peering into the enclosure from his perch atop a neighboring cliff, the narrator is granted a privileged view of the elephant and its guardian: What struck me right away when I saw the elephant and its keeper alone in the elephant house together was the real closeness of the two, a much stronger bond than they revealed in public. Their affection Page 398 → for each other was clear in every move they made. It was almost as though they saved up their deep feelings during the day, making sure no one noticed their friendship, and let them out at night when it was just the two of them…It was impossible to miss the special warmth produced by the feeling of trust by which the two were bound. While the keeper swept the floor, the elephant would wave its trunk and lightly tap the keeper's back.43 A profound connection clearly exists between elephant and keeper. But nowhere does Murakami's text indicate that this man protested the town's treatment of the animal under his care; he does not seem to be troubled even by the tight cuffing of the animal's leg. Perhaps the caretaker is simply relieved that the elephant's life has been spared. Yet his utter silence concerning the elephant's confinement notably contradicts with his feelings for the animal. The narrator's silence is equally striking, considering his own fondness for the elephant and his greater concern for the animal than its caretaker after they disappear; elephant and caretaker vanish at the same time, but as its title suggests the narrative focuses on the elephant, not its human companion. “The Elephant's Disappearance” most obviously exposes corrupt and inefficient officialdom by highlighting the various deals made among zoo owners, developers, the mayor, and politicians, as well as the town's inability to keep track of an animal so large and immobile as a feeble, heavily chained elephant. Murakami's story also underscores people's ready disregard of inept bureaucracy: the narrator states explicitly that even something as disturbing as the elephant's disappearance would not change society. He remarks, “The earth continued its monotonous rotation, politicians continued issuing unreliable proclamations, people continued yawning on their way to the office, and children continued preparing for exams.”44 Human behaviors seem impervious to empirical circumstances. “The Elephant's Disappearance” is also rife with informational ambiguity, particularly concerning the elephant's disappearance. Although the narrator, as the last person to see the animal, appears to have more insight into its disappearance than any other resident, his only conclusion is that it simply vanished. The failure of anyone in the story, from the narrator to the townspeople, the officials investigating the incident, even the newspaper reporters, to propose the most obvious scenario—someone with access to one of the keys unlocked the animal and removed it from the enclosure the same way it came in—further mocks human foolishness. Yet little heed is paid to the well-being of the animal. The Page 399 →real mystery is not what happened to the elephant after its last sighting but why such a creature was treated so inhumanely in full view of supposedly wellintentioned people.45 Literature charges even indigenous peoples with mingling respect and mistreatment of animals. Touched on in Nitta Jir's Tale of Alaska and Topas Tamapima's “The Last Hunter,” discussed in Chapter 2, this paradox is captured particularly well in the Japanese writer and Hokkaido native Oguma Hideo's twenty-four-section narrative poem “Tobu sori” (Flying Sled, 1935). Oguma was active in Japan's prewar proletarian literary movement, and although he was not an especially prolific writer, what he did produce attracted the attention of both his contemporaries and postwar scholars; “Flying Sled” has been called “the finest long poem ever written in Japanese” and “virtually unparalleled in Japanese literature.”46 In some ways the ecoambiguity articulated in this poem is more understandable than the contradiction highlighted in Murakami's story: while the latter focuses on the admiration and confinement of a single animal, Oguma's poem contrasts concurrent respect for the nonhuman in toto with abuse of a particular species. In so doing, it addresses a common dilemma in relationships among people and the nonhuman: appreciating environments often facilitates condoning or even glorifying damage to one of their component parts. “Flying Sled,” written explicitly for the Ainu people, draws attention to the plight of Ainu driven from Hokkaido

onto Sakhalin.47 As David Goodman has argued, the text attempts to describe, and make credible, “an alternative, outward-looking, culturally tolerant way to be Japanese.”48 But although grounded in a specific place and time, the poem reaches out to address conflicts between indigenous peoples and more recent arrivals. “Flying Sled” critiques Japanese incursion onto Ainu lands and rampant destruction of northern forests, contrasting Japanese profligacy with the Ainu's prudent use of resources.49 At the same time, it depicts the Ainu as far more methodical and effective hunters than Japanese. “Flying Sled” exposes a common dichotomy between attitudes and behaviors toward the nonhuman: those more respectful of the natural world (the Ainu) are in certain situations ironically more responsible for its destruction (because they are such successful hunters, the Ainu kill more birds than the Japanese). Oguma's poem by no means depicts the Ainu as wasteful, and in fact it describes them innovatively utilizing as many body parts as they can from the other animals they kill: “The Japanese were incompetent hunters. / Tearing off the pelts of the animals they’d killed / they nonchalantly discard bones and carcasses. / But the Ainu decorated the periphery of their homes / with countless animal bones.” The Page 400 →narrator notes that the Ainu pray fervently over these bones day and night and “never forget to reminisce over the death of the animals.”50 Interestingly, here he gives one of the few examples of Ainu use of animal body parts that might seem frivolous: the Ainu respect the bones of deceased animals, but survival does not depend on homes decorated with skeleton fragments. By emphasizing how successful Ainu are at killing certain animals, even if only to survive, “Flying Sled” provides important perspectives on the delicate balance between harmony with and harm to environments. “Flying Sled” opens tersely: “Winter attacked” (fuyu ga osottekita).51 The narrator depicts humans and much of nature both standing in blank amazement, slapped by the suddenly brutal wind and snow. After describing a group of people preparing for winter, the narrator reveals their identity: early twentieth-century Ainu living in Sakhalin. He points out that the wind and snow are less of a threat to Ainu and the natural world than are the Japanese. The Japanese have driven Ainu and bears from their homes in Hokkaido, and the populations of both are dying off. In both Hokkaido and Sakhalin forests are just as endangered as their mammalian counterparts. Although the displaced Ainu in Sakhalin cut down trees the state has claimed as its own, they do so to survive. In addition, the damage they inflict on landscapes is mild compared to that wreaked by Japanese lumber mills and paper companies; the latter plunder forests purely for profit and then set fire to remaining foliage to obliterate evidence of their crimes. Oguma's poem here establishes familiar contrasts between national governments and corporations on the one hand and indigenous peoples on the other. Complicating matters is the description earlier in the text of the Ainu, who are desperate for jobs, as delighted to hear that the ji paper company is opening another factory on the island. The narrator's description of hunting birds introduces further paradoxes. Emphasizing the difference between Ainu and Japanese techniques, he reveals the Ainu as making a larger mark on some nonhuman species than do the Japanese. Halfway through “Flying Sled” the poem describes a Japanese forest ranger trying to shoot a flock of birds. The ranger came to Sakhalin partly to take refuge in nature. And his marksmanship leaves much to be desired. In fact, the narrator mocks his inability to kill more than a few of the dozens of birds that swarm overhead when he blows the birdcall: His shooting position is good, and his rifle is of high quality, he can almost reach out and touch his prey the ranger aims and fires with a bang, but what happens, Page 401 → only one or two birds fall and sometimes he can't hit even a single bird… [He wonders] to shoot one or two

do I have to blow on my flute and draw as many as thirty?52 The ranger's Ainu friend Ikubashui (Jpn. Gontar) then steps forward, calls the birds to the branches overhead, fires his gun, and the animals drop around his feet like ripe fruit. Gontar explains that the hunter must proceed methodically, working from the bottom of the tree to the top, even if the most desired birds are perched the highest: the Ainu begins with the bird closest to him, the first target, 1he shoots birds one after the other beginning with those on the lowest branches and gradually working his way up the tree, and after he shoots the mountain birds perched in the treetops, he has shot them all.53 The Ainu's instructions are cold and calculating; the hunter is simply to kill whatever stands between him and his prize. In contrast, the narrator decorates in rhetorical flourishes Gontar's relationship with his firearm: “When the rifle was gripped in the large hands of the Ainu / steel and wood, gunpowder and target / synthesized into a rifle / used as a living thing / like a part of the Ainu's body [Ainu ni totte wa nikutai no ichibu no y ni / ikite tsukawareteiru].”54 The rifle is virtually an appendage of the Ainu, much more a “natural” part of his physique than is true of the Japanese. It is not clear what Gontar and the ranger do with the birds they have shot, but the text implies that they leave them where they fell. Gontar apparently took the lives of these animals simply to show the ranger how best to kill large numbers of wildlife. This is only one of their many hunting expeditions together, the ranger always using the Ainu as his guide. The gulf between the Ainu people's admiration for and killing of animals is readily bridged: they depend on these animals for survival. Oguma's poem nonetheless depicts instances of wanton, meaningless slaughter. The next sections of “Flying Sled” feature a devastating avalanche that severely injures the ranger; the poem ends with Gontar and his loyal sleddog team rushing their Japanese friend to safety. These lines, reminiscent of the poem's opening comments about winter's sudden and fierce arrival, alsoPage 402 → echo those earlier in the text that describe Gontar's close relationships with his dogs. The concluding lines indicate a partial return to more expected, less ambiguous relationships between Ainu and animals—Ainu are undaunted by fierce weather and enjoy close connections with their dogs. Oguma's narrative poem contrasts Ainu and Japanese relationships with landscapes, revealing inconsistencies in both sets of behaviors. Even more noteworthy are the divergences these inconsistencies spawn between people's feelings toward the natural world and how they actually treat the nonhuman. For the most part the Ainu profoundly respect animals, going so far as to pray fervently to the animal bones decorating their houses. These attitudes make Gontar's bird slaughter, and Ainu hunting techniques in general, seem all the more disconcerting.55 Literature depicts not just animals as suffering from human respect for the nonhuman. In contrast with Murakami's “The Elephant's Disappearance” and Oguma's “Flying Sled,” Kim Kwanggyu's “Nlgn sonamu” (Old Pine Tree, 1986) portrays people's concern for a tree as underlying its agony. This poem centers on an individual frustrated with the way society has treated a weary pine that has stood for more than a century in the front garden of an assembly hall. Contrasting his own compassion with the relative indifference of those managing the tree's care, the poem's speaker claims to be the only person who can empathize with the long-suffering tree. More important, he exposes the significant gap between the feelings people have for the tree and the effects of their behaviors on it:

people value the tree and believe it important, but they quite unintentionally damage it. “Old Pine Tree” reveals some of the shortcomings of human attempts at “preservation,” at least from the perspective of the nonhuman bodies being manipulated. Unlike the trees in most creative texts on ecodegradation, the tree of Kim Kwanggyu's poem is protected under a “nature preservation” (chayn poho) order, the second part of which (i.e., “preservation”; poho) those charged with its care have taken literally. They have made sure the tree does not change, at least outwardly; early in the poem the speaker claims that it has “remained standing in that place / unchanged for more than a century” (paegy nyn l pynham opsi nnn / k chari e s isstta).56 But as pointed out in Chapter 6 in the discussion of Kim Kwanggyu's “Pagoda Tree,” a poem written in the same year as “Old Pine Tree” that also features a tree which has been “preserved” and “remained unchanged” for some time, even plastic trees in hermetically sealed environments change color and shape unless manipulated. Desperate to forestall outward transformation, and not considering the long-term consequences of their actions, people increase the suffering of the anthropomorphized old pine tree by postponing the inevitable: Page 403 → Judging by your trunk, where even the resin has dried up your roots too must be painful. Having no idea of your exhaustion, association members [hoewndl] have enclosed your lower trunk in cement and even while administering injections, tell you just to keep standing there.57 “Old Pine Tree” not only records what has been done to the tree, noting that its lower part has been encased in cement and that it has been subjected to injections. Empathizing with the tree as most people cannot, the poem's speaker also speculates and then asserts how these acts have affected the pine: its roots “must be painful” (ppuriga ap’l ttaedo toennnde) and it itself is “exhausted” (kodalp’m). The tree has been altered chemically and prosthetically to give the appearance of remaining unchanged, to its long-term detriment. In the second half of the text the tree is urged to defy these painful attempts to prolong its life; the poem claims that nothing is more natural than old age and that the tree should surrender to its presumed longing to “take some time off” and can feel free to rest for several centuries.58 This is because people can do virtually nothing to stave off its demise; the tree's only respite will come from rest and eventual death. “Old Pine Tree” concludes with the tree heeding the speaker's advice and finally allowing itself to relax: After keeping them open for more than a century you shut your green eyes and at last have fallen asleep standing up old pine tree with your drooping red branches59 While in the opening of the poem the phrase “for more than a century” (paegy nyn) signaled continuity, here it marks the end of a life, or at least of an era. In truth, the speaker has no more insight into how the tree is actually feeling than the individuals who administer its injections and apply its body cast. Both groups appear to have its best interests in mind. But unlike the efforts of city employees to preserve the tree's appearance, the speaker

attempts to ensure the tree's comfort; granting the tree agency, he gives it permission to act as it desires. That it decides literally to “fall asleep” (chamdnnguna) highlights the ignorance of officials who “preserve” the flora they deem important. Ironically, only when sleeping is the tree depictedPage 404 → as having color. In the early lines of the poem the speaker talks about how it casts cool shade and moves with the breeze but does not mention its hues. Only as it relaxes are its “eyes” said to be green and its branches red. There are times, Kim Kwanggyu's poem argues, where death is preferable; treating nonhuman bodies humanely does not necessarily mean prolonging their lives. This text focuses on a single pine that it claims has stood in the garden in front of Saemal (New Community) Assembly Hall for more than a century. Although the damage explicitly described is temporally, not spatially pervasive, little separates this tree from any number of plants that have been “preserved” to their disadvantage. As the Australian aboriginal writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poem “Municipal Gum” (1964) likewise laments: “Gumtree in the city street, / Hard bitumen around your feet, / Rather you should be / In the cool world of leafy forest halls / And wild bird calls / Here you seems to me / Like that poor cart-horse / Castrated, broken, a thing wronged, / Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged, / Whose hung head and listless mien express / Its hopelessness. / Municipal gum, it is dolorous / To see you thus / Set in your black grass of bitumen—/ O fellow citizen, / What have they done to us?”60 Here too a tree has been preserved, only to be trapped in bitumen (asphalt, tar), its hell prolonged like that of the cart horse. As in many poems, including Kim Kwanggyu's, the fate of the nonhuman is aligned with that of human societies: trees, horses, and aboriginal peoples have been taken from their homelands and deposited in unfamiliar and often hostile ground. In “Municipal Gum” the analogy is explicit, the last line speaking of the tree as a “fellow citizen,” and in Kim Kwanggyu's it is more implicit, the irony of the “old” tree suffering outside the New Community Assembly Hall striking. Death would appear a welcome release for a tree whose life has been forcibly extended by those who respect it not for its own sake but for their aesthetic benefit. On the other hand, as Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poem reminds us, the tree would be more content in a “cool world of leafy forest halls” than in the garden of an assembly hall, alive or dead. Threads of life, death, and disappearance weave themselves through these poems, complicating relationships between beliefs and behaviors and ultimately muddying environmental possibilities.

Admiring Ecosystems, Longing for Control Even more convoluted conflicts between attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis the natural world arise not out of concrete relationships with particular animals or plants but instead out of admiration for larger ecosystems. NarrativesPage 405 → engaging with these dilemmas appear in many permutations, but most intriguing are those that feature appreciation as leading to behaviors that injure environments. The Korean writer Ko n's five-stanza poem “Kkot” (Flowers, 1986), for instance, shows desire for more greenery as resulting in behaviors that contradict both each other and this yearning itself. Written several years before the Seoul Olympics in response to government attempts to decorate the city for foreign visitors, this text depicts officials importing mature flora from the countryside, rather than planting seeds and bulbs. Rural residents, displeased with these developments and hoping to evoke sympathy, then claim that their landscape has been even more compromised than it actually is.61 Both groups feel strongly about greenery, but “Flowers” depicts even those most wishing to be surrounded by it as either displacing it or overstating its removal. Like many creative works addressing environments damaged by people, Ko n's poem laments the absence of familiar vegetation (flowers) and the prolific sprouting of human artifacts (televisions). The text begins with the regretful comment: Spring has come, spring has come and gone, but in the mountain valleys there isn't a single flower

not even a common magnolia or cherry blossom.62 The second stanza, relating the discovery that actually not all flowers have disappeared from the mountains, injects ambiguity about conditions; the poem casts doubt as to just how many spaces and species have been affected. Several kinds of flowers are blooming on bushes, on seed plants, and even on individual stalks in a nearby garden and in places that were not explored in the first stanza: Luckily, in the vegetable garden yellow flowers are blooming on a plant gone to seed How much joy! [lmana nmch’inn kippminya] Go around the mountain aha, here are heaps of blazing mountain bush clover and look, at that field, lying idle, tiny shepherd's purse thickly blazing [chauk’age p’i inne] of course, blazing, blazing [p’i inne p’i inne] Page 406 → The speaker's excitement is palpable: he is overcome with happiness at finding yellow flowers in the garden, albeit on a plant in decline, and is so delighted to see blazing mountain bush clover and shepherd's purse that he repeats the word “blazing” four times. The claims in the third and fifth stanzas that not a single flower is visible, that the entire landscape has been uprooted, thus come as a surprise. The third stanza explains what has happened to the foliage: Everything useful, even the flowers, has been pulled out and taken away all our nation's landscape has been pulled out and taken away to Seoul, to Seoul.63 And the poem's fifth and final stanza laments what has replaced the missing flowers in the countryside. Unlike in Masuda Mizuko's short story “Horn,” discussed in Chapter 4, where flowers in the municipal parks are replaced by other flora and are replanted in private gardens, here they are swapped for artifacts of Seoul material culture, which become more abundant, or at least more apparent in the countryside:64 Spring has come and gone but ha ha, not a flower to be seen, just TVs just TVs.65 “Flowers” here reveals the subjective character of judgments about environmental health, especially their reliance on spatial perspectives (the speaker claims that no flowers remain but does not specify his geographical scope) and species bias (the poem can claim that no flowers remain only by dismissing as insignificant those that do). Even more important, “Flowers” shows that preference for a particular species can make an individual assert that a landscape devoid of this species effectively lacks nature writ large. The fourth stanza reveals reverse manipulation of perceptions of environmental health:

Not only the flowers! Not only the girls! The big trees on the grounds of the township office, even they Page 407 → will soon be pulled out and taken away to the 1988 Olympics their roots wrapped up.66 Believing it important to host the Olympics in a green metropolis, the government attempts to bring the countryside to the city rather than replicate the countryside in the city. The repetition of “pull out” (ppop’y kada) in the third and fourth stanzas underlines the violence of this process; greening cityscapes involves transplanting, not increasing national greenery. Ko n's “Flowers” most obviously exposes the hypocrisy of the Korean government in decorating the capital with plant life from rural regions. Seoul's new green is not plastic, as it is in several works analyzed in this book, but it in many ways is artificial. On the other hand, by showing the conflicting motives and behaviors both of those who moved the plants from country to city and of the rural people most deeply affected by this change, the poem also draws attention to the convoluted processes undergirding green desire. Written four decades earlier under very different circumstances, the Japanese writer Dazai Osamu's novel Tsugaru (1944) likewise addresses how individuals with great attachment to flora end up displacing them.67 One of Japan's most loved and loathed literary figures, Dazai hailed from Kanagi, a village in Kita Tsugaru county, one of Japan's most isolated regions. Dazai called Tsugaru a novel, but it reads more like a travelogue of a three-week journey around the remote and impoverished Tsugaru peninsula, located at the northernmost end of Honshu. While Ko n's “Flowers” speaks simply about going around an unnamed mountain, Tsugaru touches on the history of a region, the lives and character of its people, and its topography, as well as art, love, friendship, and family.68 Discussions of the nonhuman world appear throughout, but only a few passages address environmental harm caused by people. Instead, in this work the nonhuman often serves as metaphor or adornment. For instance, in the introduction the narrator describes visiting Hirosaki Castle while a student at Hirosaki College. He remembers being deeply moved by the sight of the town below, which he likens to one of the “hidden ponds” featured in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, Japan's earliest poetry anthology: I stood in a corner of the castle's courtyard, looking out at Mount Iwaki, when I suddenly noticed a dream town spreading out beneath my feet. I shuddered. Up until then, I had always thought of the castle as standing alone on the edge of town. But look, right below the castle was a classically elegant town, the likes of which I had never seen. Page 408 →There it was, just as it had been for hundreds of years, its small roofs lined up and crouching silently, holding its breath. Ahhh, there's been a town even in a place like this! I was young, but without thinking I let out a deep sigh, as though in a dream. It was like those “hidden ponds” [komorinu] that frequently appear in the Man’ysh…I have no choice but to shout out forcefully that Hirosaki Castle is a famous, matchless castle because it has this hidden pond. Suppose flowers with many branches bloomed on the shores of the hidden pond and the whitewalled castle tower rose mutely above them, that castle would certainly be one of the greatest in the world. And a hot spring near this famous castle would eternally preserve its simple, honest character.69 The narrator describes himself as stirred not by nature but instead by the built environment; he looks dispassionately at Mount Iwaki while the dream-like town spreads out beneath his feet, provoking a shudder. It is to him a “hidden pond,” one not only hidden from view, as the town was for so long, but whose water, like rooftops themselves, does not flow freely.70 Although early Japanese poetry often compares hidden ponds to depressed and helpless hearts, Dazai's travelogue likens the built environment to such a body of water. What

makes the castle peerless is not a hidden pond but instead the town below it, which resembles a hidden pond. The narrator backtracks slightly when he claims that if flowers bloomed beside this town, then the nearby castle “would certainly be one of the greatest in the world.” But the built environment remains more enticing than the natural world. In contrast, at other points in Tsugaru the narrator highlights the harshness of the land and goes so far as to declare its bleakness beyond description. He gives a chronology of Tsugaru's harvests which reveals that in the past 330 years there have been about sixty poor harvests or total crop failures, an average of one every five years.71 The narrator remembers the painful accounts of starvation in Tsugaru that he heard as a child. Learning that nothing has changed despite significant advances in agronomy, he protests to his friend N: “This can't be allowed to happen!…People are always talking about the remarkable world of science, but they're simply irresponsible if they can't teach farmers how to avoid these kinds of crop failures.”72 N reassures him that researchers are doing all that they can to develop seeds better able to withstand the cold, but he admits that poor harvests still occur regularly. Parts of Tsugaru are even less amenable to human shaping, resisting not only machines but also language. The narrator declares that the seashore at the northernmost end of Honshu is not scenery, since unlike so many other places on the Japanese archipelago, this landscape has not been tamed by art: Page 409 → After we’d been walking for about two hours, the scenery around us [atari no fkei] became extraordinarily strange…It was no longer scenery [fkei de nakatta]. What we call scenery [fkei] is something that has been gazed at and described by people for many many years, that has been, one could say, absorbed and softened by human eyes [ningen no me de namerarete nanka shi], that has been reared and tamed by people [ningen ni kawarete], so that even Kegon Falls, at 350 feet, gives off a faint human scent, like a fierce animal in a cage [ori no naka no mj no y na, hito kusai nioi ga kasuka ni kanzerareru]. Without exception, all the famous places and dangerous places that from the days of old have been painted in pictures, written in songs, or sung in haiku let you discover a human expression [ningen no hyj]. But this seacoast at the northern end of Honshu is nothing at all like scenery [fkei ni mo nani mo, natte ya shinai].73 Tsugaru describes a truism of classical Japanese aesthetics: the poet's pen and the painter's brush have humanized landscapes. The natural world not only has been described; no matter how dramatic, it also has been “absorbed and softened by human eyes” and “reared by people.” In other words, not only have people physically shaped actual ecosystems, art allows its consumers to discover a “human expression” in every landscape. Also interesting is the narrator's comparison of waterfalls to caged animals: even though the former fall relatively freely and the latter often yearn to become free, both give off a “human scent.” In contrast, Tsugaru is or at least appears totally untamed. The narrator also notes that just as the Russian novelist and travel writer Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov could think only of the word “dreadful” (osoroshii) when asked by a ship's captain to find a “wonderful adjective” (subarashii keiyshi) for the large waves pounding their vessel, he too is at a loss for words to describe the rocks and waters of northern Honshu. According to the narrator, like Goncharov's sea and raging oceans or wild desert storms everywhere, the landscape before him can be described only as “dreadful.”74 “Dreadful” is not more scientific a term than those used in poetry, and it continues to anthropomorphize the nonhuman, but unlike much East Asian aesthetic discourse, it does not idealize landscapes. Untamable even by words, this of all lands would appear to be relatively immune to environmental degradation. But in his discussion of Kanita, the largest town on the western coast of the Tsugaru peninsula, the narrator shows that conditions are more complicated. After a night with friends, he sets off for a hill on the outskirts of town. Looking down from Hirosaki Castle, he had been entranced by the rooftops below; looking out at the open Page 410 → ocean, he had been repelled by its unruly rocks and water. But now, looking down from the hilltop at

Kanita, he is impressed with the fecund land and water spreading out before him. People in Kanita and neighboring villages enjoy seas that supply fresh fish and fields whose richness would surprise outsiders. The narrator criticizes those who claim that the area should be treasured because of its trees, but in fact he too expresses great pride in the region's foliage, its cypress in particular. He describes the woodlands: “The branches of Tsuguru's forests are so entangled and remain so green and luxuriant even in the winter that one would think Aomori [lit. green forest] Prefecture had gotten its name from them. In times past it was counted as one of Japan's three great forest areas.”75 The narrator cites a 1929 volume on Japanese geography and ethnography which notes that the region began managing its forests in the 1680s and subsequently established approximately one hundred substantial woodlands. Seeking to capitalize on these resources, the Meiji government (1868–1912) continued Tokugawa practices of forest management. Favorable reviews of Aomori Prefecture's cypress spread loudly and widely, leading to increased degradation. The 1929 report continues: This area's wood quality is suitable for all kinds of construction projects. The timber is especially good at withstanding moisture, produces abundant lumber, and is comparatively easy to transport, all of which contribute to its excellent reputation. The annual production is eight million cubic feet of lumber…In the vicinity of the Kanita River there is a national cypress forest that has been named one of Japan's three most beautiful forests. The harbor of the town of Kanita is very active in transporting lumber. It is here that the forest railway leaves the coast and enters the mountains, returning daily with large quantities of lumber. The lumber here is known for being inexpensive and of good quality.76 This wood is at the mercy not of poets and painters, as is much scenery (fkei), but instead of loggers; the most desirable timber is quickly harvested. The narrator claims that just fifteen years later, during wartime (1944), the number of cubic feet of cypress taken from the region's forests trebled. Cypress is not the only tree felled; cryptomeria, beech, oak, cinnamon tree, horse chestnut, and larch are also taken. The reference to Tokugawa silviculture suggests that woodlands are being replanted, but the ability of the forest ecosystems to withstand increasing deforestation remains questionable. Most interesting here is the seemingly inevitable disjuncture between attitudes and actions toward the nonhuman, cypress trees in particular: echoing Page 411 →Zhuangzi's parable of the useless tree, discussed in chapters 1, 2, and 4, Tsugaru asserts that the most highly valued species are killed most rapidly and that nothing can be done about it. After noting the abundant tree harvests that pass through Kanita, the narrator comments, “Even if the people of Kanita don't want to be proud, they can't help it.”77 He does not specify the object of their pleasure: the townspeople could be proud that they live near a national treasure or that their town has the infrastructure to transport vast quantities of precious timber. Most likely, they are smug about their swelling profits. No desire or even willingness to change behaviors apparently exists. The narrator remarks that, having learned of the region's bounty, the reader might believe Kanita a “heaven of perfect contentment.”78 Actually, he claims, the town and its people are gentle and notably lacking in vigor. They supposedly have no control over their emotions and also are utterly apathetic, so much so that they sadden visitors to the region. Tsugaru implies that Kanita residents will be capable of change only when times turn tough. Their mildness and lack of energy are blamed on the town's being “blessed by nature” (tennen no megumi ga i)—the easier it is to extract resources from the nonhuman, the narrator posits, the more lackadaisical people become.79 It is only after the landscape has been greatly disrupted that they may have any chance of altering their behaviors. But by then it could be too late. In the meantime, Dazai's travelogue suggests, people will destroy what they admire most and be proud of being compensated for so doing. Abé Kb's best-selling Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1962), one of Japan's most celebrated avant-garde novels, points to the vulnerability of the most tenacious parts of the nonhuman even more subtly than Tsugaru.80 This text features Niki Junpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist who one August afternoon travels to a remote section of Japan's seacoast looking for insects. Residents of the dunes hold him captive, and although they eventually offer him a chance to leave, he decides not to return to the city. As is true of most avant-garde writing, Woman in the Dunes proposes radical innovation in the symbolic, artistic, social, and political fields.81 But it also

calls for innovation in how people think about and interact with environments, particularly relationships between their sentiments and their actions. Gaps between the two characterize the work of the entomologist, whether amateur or professional: entomologists kill the insects by which they are most fascinated. The sand provokes a different yet no less significant attitudinal/behavioral contradiction: people believe the sand is completely overwhelming their village, yet they behave as though they can control it, which they eventually do to a limited degree. Just as insects die because people marvel at them, the Page 412 →sand ends up being manipulated even though it is believed indomitable. To be sure, the sand is at much less risk of obliteration than the valued forests of Tsugaru. Even so, Abé's novel suggests that no part of the nonhuman, even one with a long history of dominating human society and (other) nonhuman species, is beyond some measure of human control and degradation. In Woman in the Dunes Niki Junpei finds himself in an impoverished village—possibly near Tottori, Japan—where many houses are below sand level: “Before long, all the houses seemed to be built in hollows dug out of the slope of the sand. The slope of the sand became higher than the rooftops. Each row of houses sank deeper into the sand hollows. The slope of the sand suddenly got steeper. It must have been at least twenty meters to the roofs of the houses. What kind of life did they lead down there?”82 Niki soon learns more than he had bargained for about this village. An elderly resident arranges for him to spend the night at the nearly buried home of a local widow; the following morning he discovers that the ladder from the top of her sand hollow, down which he climbed the night before, has been removed and that he is now imprisoned in the dunes. The remainder of the novel consists of Niki's experiences in the hollow—his unsuccessful attempts at escaping, the Sisyphean battle against sand that threatens to bury him alive, his tumultuous relationship with the nameless woman of the dunes, and his crow trap turned water supply, which in the end gives him so much hope for the future that he does not take advantage of the long-awaited rope ladder when it at last is lowered into his hole. The novel concludes: “There was no need to escape quickly. On the round-trip ticket he now held, destination and place of return were blanks for him to fill…He might as well postpone his escape.”83 Seven years later, the narrator reveals, Niki has still not returned home. A sensation since its publication, translated into several dozen languages and adapted into a prize-winning surrealistic film by Teshigahara Hiroshi in 1964, Woman in the Dunes has garnered considerable critical attention both in Japan and abroad.84 Niki has been discussed as “the very personification of the alienation of modern life, ”85 as a man who, “recognizing that loneliness and impatience are nothing more than confusion and ignorance, anticipates finally being able to stand at the beginning of a new pathway of human relations.”86 The village he encounters has been interpreted as “a critique of the fate of the traditional rural village in modern, urban, capitalist Japan”87 and the sand dunes as signifying the “wasteland” of twentieth-century Japan. And the novel itself has been said to force the reader “into an acute self-awareness of the absurdity of the human condition.”88 These assessments are based on readings of specific passages in Woman in the Dunes. For instance, Page 413 →Niki's obsession with insects is interpreted by both colleagues and strangers as “proof of mental flaws”: Even in children, unusual fancy for insect collecting often indicates an Oedipus complex. Children compensate for their unsatisfied desires by eagerly sticking pins into the dead bodies of insects that they never need fear will escape. And not giving this up once they become adults is a clear sign that the condition has worsened. So it is no accident that entomologists often have a great appetite for possessions and that they are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniacs, and gay. So from this point it is but a step to pessimism and suicide…Actually, that the man had never confided his hobby to anyone itself seemed to prove that he was aware that there was something squeamish about it.89 Similarly, even before arriving in the dunes, Niki had likened himself, his students, education, and the world to sand, since all are multifaceted and often give the impression of being something they are not. Conversing with one of his colleagues about the education system, he had declared, “An illusory education [gens kyiku] is one that makes you believe that something is when it is not [nai mono o desu ne, aru y ni omoikomaseru, gens kyiku desu yo]······So you see I’m very interested in sand in this respect since even though it's a solid, it has very clear hydrodynamic properties…I brought up the example of sand······because ultimately isn't the world like sand? …You yourself become sand…I think my students also are something like sand.”90 In another inversion of William Blake's famed line “to see a world in a grain of sand,” Niki proclaims sand to be like the world. Not unlike the speaker of Ko n's “Yngil Bay,” who declares sand involved in both birth and death (discussed in

Chapter 5), and the narrator of Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, who in comparing himself to sand highlights his ambiguous position vis-à-vis environmental degradation (discussed in Chapter 4), Niki underscores the multiple properties, the literal and figurative fluidity of this substance. Instead of entirely metaphorizing insects and sand—that is to say, reading Niki's interest in insects only as highlighting his failure to thrive in contemporary society, Niki's and the villagers’ struggles with sand only as symbolizing the absurdities of twentieth-century existence, and sand only as a powerful illustration of illusion—what if we also analyzed insects and sand as two tangible nonhuman components? Encouraging such readings are the novel's many passages about the physical properties of insects, including their diverging physiologies and ability to survive under even the harshest Page 414 →conditions, and of sand, including the diameter of its grains, its formation, its endless movement, as well as its destructive capabilities. Such an approach is fortified by Niki's own fascination with both. He pays no heed to the people watching him as he trudges along the unfamiliar dunes, the narrator declaring: “The only things that interested him were sand and insects” (kare ni kanshin ga aru no wa, moppara suna to mushi dake datta no de aru).91 Reading insects and sand as actual parts of the nonhuman provides a more comprehensive appreciation of Abé's novel and a better understanding of human /nonhuman dynamics and possibilities.92 Niki travels to the dunes hoping to discover and take back to the city a new species of insect that will perpetuate his name. He grasps his net and begins striking it against the clumps of grass that line his sandy path. Having both admired and killed insects since childhood, Niki enjoys watching them as much as he enjoys sticking pins into their bodies. Flies are depicted as remarkably adaptable, the only organisms capable of surviving truly unforgiving desert ecosystems: “they were fine even in environments where other insects could not live, places like deserts, where all other living things perished.”93 But as invincible as they are vis-à-vis the sand, they are vulnerable to people, some of whom imprison if not kill them; people can be more threatening to insects than are the dunes, since even flies are imperiled by Niki's net. The narrator stresses the irony of Niki's position after the villagers capture him in their own mesh; he highlights Niki's failure to recognize the parallels between his own situation and that of the insects he captures. Describing Niki as “a big black fly that had believed it was assiduously flying but that in fact was simply rubbing its nose against the window pane,”94 the narrator claims that the imprisoned Niki is “an animal that finally realizes the gap in the fence through which it was trying to escape in fact is nothing more than the entrance to its cage······a fish that, after striking its snout how many times, finally sees that the glass of the goldfish bowl is a wall it cannot penetrate.”95 This powerful metaphor of the caged animal draws attention to human confinement, even mistreatment, not only of people but also of animals. Niki likewise compares his initial experiences in the dunes with those of a beetle or mouse that has been lured to an inhospitable environment, although he quickly reassures himself that because he is not an animal, the village leaders and their minions cannot force him to work. But of course they take advantage of him, just as they have taken advantage of so many others, and just as he takes advantage of the woman in the dunes. Similarly, after binding and gagging the woman, Niki declares, “I’m a human being and you can't simply chain me like a dog.”96 Yet he treats this woman like the very animal he declares Page 415 →he is not. The most obvious commentary here is on people's abuse of other people: the village leaders abuse Niki and the villagers, and Niki abuses the woman in the dunes, but Woman in the Dunes also addresses human abuse of the nonhuman. Niki loudly protests his own imprisonment, lamenting that he cannot leave the sand hole even to purchase his own cigarettes and saké, but he appears to take human mistreatment of animals as a right. Woman in the Dunes reveals the many paradoxes of his actions. Abé's novel depicts sand as the antithesis of insects; whereas insects (as individuals, but not as swarms) are readily crushed by people's fingers, the sand (as dunes, but not as individual grains) readily crushes human lives. The narrative features people caught in a thankless struggle against a vicious, nearly overwhelming nonhuman substance. Niki speaks abstractly about the need to adapt to and move with the dunes, rather than fight against them. He wonders, “Certainly, sand was not suitable for existence. Yet was a fixed state utterly indispensable?…If we were to quit this fixed existence and to give ourselves up to the fluidity of the sand, competition would come to an end.”97 He even hallucinates about moving with the flow. But he quickly discovers that although possible, human survival is precarious in this environment; struggles are many and comforts few. Walking along the dunes,

Niki thinks to himself that “no matter what they did, there was no way to escape the law of the sand” (izure, suna no hsoku ni, sakaraeru hazu mo nai no ni).98 And Niki observes that this has been true for generations; the same sand currents that threaten his new home in the dunes also destroyed and devoured prosperous cities and great empires, even those that seemed as though they would endure forever: “The ancient cities, whose permanence not a soul had doubted······could not overcome the law of the flowing mm. diameter sand.”99 The sands also damage landscapes. As the narrator remarks, “The sands never rested. Quietly, but surely, they assaulted and destroyed the surface of the earth” (suna wa kesshite yasumanai. shizuka ni, shikashi kakujitsu ni, chihy o okashi, horoboshite iku).100 Winds shape the uppermost layers of the dunes, but for the most part, like the expanding desert in Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, they appear indomitable. On the other hand, the well-grounded perception that the sand is virtually impervious to human manipulation does not prevent people from trying to use it to their advantage. The woman in the dunes comments to Niki that when the tide recedes, even military tanks can drive over the wet, solidified intertidal sands.101 This casual remark reveals compacted sand as potentially the most vulnerable to human use, but Abé's text does not elaborate. The woman in the dunes also tells Niki that the villagers have discovered how to profit from the sand: they sell it to construction companies, which mix Page 416 →it with cement to adulterate poured concrete. In so doing the villagers most obviously jeopardize human safety. As Niki points out, anything built with substandard concrete made of cement blended with such salty sand is almost certain to collapse prematurely. When Niki asks the woman how the villagers can deliberately put people's lives in danger, she inquires simply, “Why should we worry what happens to others?”102 Niki for the first time recognizes that the people of the dunes, having been virtually abandoned by the outside world, see themselves as victims and thus that the line between “friend” and “enemy” is not as clear as he formerly believed. But the topic of disturbing the dunes by selling off the sand is quickly dropped. Instead, Woman in the Dunes focuses almost entirely on the manipulation of sand when it is perceived to be at its most threatening. In other words, Abé's novel mutes the conflicts between perceptions and the known properties of the sand (believing the sand completely overpowering when actually it can sometimes support the weight of military vehicles) and between behaviors and conditions (selling sand to construction companies despite knowing that this puts human lives at risk). And it highlights the incongruity between attitudes and behaviors (believing the sand completely overpowering while at the same time attempting to overpower it). The decision of the village elders to remain in the dunes is the clearest example of the latter. Rather than relocate to a more hospitable ecosystem after the dunes rise well above their rooftops, the local leaders condemn much of their population to endless days and nights of shoveling. The villagers somehow create a dystopian life for themselves in their sand pits while manipulating slightly the movements of the dunes. The narrator emphasizes the precariousness of their situation; if only a single household fails to shovel out its hole, whole sections of the village risk collapse. Yet this hazard seems only to encourage them to continue to defy the movement of the sand. Having stumbled on a way to extract water from the dunes, Niki, who spends most of the novel plotting and unsuccessfully trying to escape, will contribute to and likely facilitate the villagers’ endeavor. In this light, Niki's earlier comments to one of the village elders about turning the dunes into a tourist attraction have to be taken seriously. Niki urges the elder to capitalize both on people's fascination with the sand and on the properties of the sand itself: “People today are drawn to the sand; it holds a strange fascination for them······There's a way of taking advantage of this [kono ten o riy suru tte iu te mo aru wake da]······You can develop a new tourist spot······You don't go against the sand, you follow it, you take advantage of it [suna ni shitagatte, sore o riy suru] ······In short, you have to try to completely change your thinking.”103 Significantly, Niki conflates “following” Page 417 →(shitagau) the sand with “taking advantage” of it (riy suru; lit. use). It rapidly becomes apparent just how much he and the villagers wish to exploit the sand. When the village elder protests that they are leading the only lives that can reasonably be led in the dunes, Niki responds that the town should try “erosion-control construction, full scale erosion-control construction.”104 The elder objects to this idea because of the cost, not because he is opposed to building a barrier to restrain the sand; he reminds Niki that the government has not designated damage from wind-blown sand eligible for accident compensation. Abé's novel suggests that the dunes are only one political decision away from being radically reshaped.

Woman in the Dunes features an ecosystem within which people must devote considerable energy simply to staying alive. Reading the sand entirely metaphorically and focusing exclusively on the novel's depictions of people's relationships with other people diverts attention from its references to human manipulation and mistreatment, both actual and potential, of their nonhuman surroundings. By invoking human imprisonment and even destruction of the nonhuman, the same discourse that highlights human-on-human abuse (similes and metaphors comparing Niki to a trapped animal) also signals anthropogenic abuse of both people and animals. Niki treats insects much as he himself is treated, although he not surprisingly protests his treatment and has no reservations about mistreating insects. Even more significant is how the novel depicts fascination, indeed obsession, as facilitating manipulation, even destruction, of nonhuman bodies, no matter how resilient. With merciless dunes and hardy insects susceptible to human shaping, Woman in the Dunes suggests that it is only a matter of time before the effects of people's behavior on landscapes become greater than those of landscapes on people. Abé's novel in some ways has proved prescient. Unlike many of East Asia's deserts, which continue to expand and wreak havoc far beyond national borders, Tottori's dunes are shrinking; seawalls at a nearby port have disrupted waterflows on which the dunes depend. For the last few years, volunteers have been regularly weeding the dunes, attempting to forestall the very infringement of greenery that was attempted after World War Two, when authorities planted trees there and tried to transform the area into farmland.105

Green Hypocrisy Literature frequently interrogates such ineffective, even detrimental “greening” of environments. Writings that exaggerate the failure, hypocrisy, and Page 418 →even malevolence of environmental movements bring to light some of the most unsettling contradictions between attitudes and behaviors. They suggest that if even those individuals and organizations most explicitly trumpeting ecological health do nothing to attempt to repair environmental damage, or if they engage in behaviors harmful to both people and nature, then there is little hope for remediation, much less prevention, of devastated environments. Some texts—including the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao's poems “Kono hana tanens” (This Flower Perennial Plant, 1995) and “Yuki no umi koide iku” (Snow Ocean Rowing, 1987)—focus on individuals who are deeply concerned about ecological damage, both local and global, who nevertheless choose not to try to repair it. These texts suggest that if even the persons most disturbed by human shaping of ecosystems withdraw without doing anything to remediate conditions, then finding people who actually will help is almost futile. “This Flower” (1995) depicts an individual who says he wants to depart the world empty-handed and wonders how anyone can die “leaving behind the shame [haji] of twentieth-century Japan,” a place he declares is on the verge of becoming “garbage empire number one” (gomi teikoku nanb wan).106 Yet rather than doing anything to help repair this damage, he sets off on a long hike with friends. The poem's speaker is not the only one concerned with ecodegradation who behaves in this way; he receives a letter from the American poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder announcing the latter's own imminent departure for the Himalaya. The contrasts between knowledge and behavior expressed in “This Flower” resemble those in several works examined in Chapter 5: awareness of environmental degradation leads to avoidance, not action. But what distinguishes “This Flower” is the gap between the attitudes of both the speaker and Snyder toward this knowledge and what behaviors ensue. By featuring friends from opposite sides of the globe whose outlooks and actions toward the nonhuman are remarkably similar, “This Flower” reinforces the cosmopolitanism of many ecoambiguities. The poem's speaker begins by celebrating the symbiosis among people, human cultural artifacts, and the natural world that he observes one October morning standing in a friend's garden: In the outskirts of Nagoya City welcoming this morning in the skies of a perfect autumn day cirrus clouds flowing in the garden of a friend dangling a 40-cm luffa one small rice field the size of about one tatami mat enclosed in cement

today we’ll first harvest rice harvest happiness.107 Page 419 → He then reveals that he plans to immerse himself further in nature by taking a two-week, 225-kilometer hike with friends along the Nagara River, which empties into Ise Bay southwest of Nagoya and is famous both in Japan and abroad for the Nagara River dam controversy.108 Pondering the lives of people he might meet outside the city, the speaker imagines a woman of nearly ninety saying that she would like to clean her house and garden before she dies. Thinking of all that she must have collected over the years—books, clothing, various plants, animals, and fungi—he claims her property is as dense as London's Royal Botanical Garden. The woman's possessions are concentrated in a single location, but his own are scattered around the world, something he would like to resolve before he dies: Well this I Books music tapes clothing ice axes skis located not only here and there in Japan but as far as North America I too want to move to heaven with just my body.109 Significantly, like the elderly woman he imagines, the speaker does not indicate what he wants to happen to these belongings, perhaps because he cannot conceive of a viable solution. If he gives them away, they simply become someone else's possessions; they perhaps decrease the overall human burden on the planet, but only indirectly, by causing the recipient to defer purchasing similar objects. There is no way to compensate entirely for the resources used to produce the objects he possessed. After communicating frustration with the scope of his own tangible baggage, the poem's speaker suddenly realizes that more dangerous to Japan's environments than the belongings of a single person are the belongings of all individuals. And still more menacing are large-scale human cultural artifacts such as buildings, dams, nuclear power plants, and even athletic facilities, which all will remain standing, at least in the short term. Immediately after declaring that he wants to die without possessions, he implicates Japan, citing some of that nation's recent environmental controversies: Wait a minute! The beginning of the twenty-first century the Japanese archipelago garbage empire number one what's more Tokyo Tower Nagara River dam fast breeder reactor Monju Page 420 → continuing with the Nagano Winter Olympics leaving behind the shame of twentieth-century Japan can anyone really die?110 The contradictory answers to this question—the import of which are accentuated by references to the Nagara River dam, the Monju nuclear facility, and the Nagano Winter Olympics (1998), all of which exacted a significant

environmental price—are that everyone dies leaving behind Japan's shame, and that no one dies: to the extent that people leave behind both objects and shame, they never completely leave the world.111 The speaker not only believes that he must put his own affairs in order but also suggests that he and everyone else must tackle some of Japan's large environmental burdens. Despite such beliefs, he conveys no actual plans to address Japan's ecological culpability. Instead, he moves from asking who can really die amid Japan's shame to describing a letter from Snyder about his impending trip to the Himalaya. Snyder says nothing about alleviating the environmental problems plaguing that region, Mount Everest in particular. Instead, he cheerfully writes that he will “say hello to Chomolungma [Everest] for Nanao [Sakaki].”112 Similarly, the poem's speaker reveals that he thinks of Everest as pressed against by the Indian subcontinent and forced to stand on tiptoe (choppiri tsumasakidatsu yo); in contrast, no mention is made of the stress on this mountain propagated by tourists, including Snyder.113 And like Snyder, he is looking forward to his upcoming hike in Japan, concluding “This Flower”: Wind north I too stretch my back Ah I will walk the Nagara River.114 This individual will be traveling along the same river whose dam he has explicitly identified as a key source of Japan's disgrace. But as with Snyder, there is no mention of doing anything to alleviate the shameful degradation. “This Flower” spotlights an individual deeply disturbed by Japan's imminent transformation into the world's largest junkyard as well as by his own contributions to this disgrace. Merely imagining an elderly woman trying to settle her affairs before she passes away makes him doubt his own ability to die in a manner he deems ideal, much less the ability of the Japanese as a whole to live in greater harmony with their environments. But the behaviors that follow on the heels of these attitudes suggest an individual who has lost hope, someone who believes he can do nothing more than escape to unavoidably compromised sites. Page 421 → Sakaki's earlier “Yuki no umi koide iku” (Snow Ocean Rowing, 1987) is narrated by an environmentally conscious individual plotting an even more drastic getaway. Here “shame” is not confined to any particular nationality; nations have melted into a distressed planet. Early in his text the poem's speaker claims there are two planet earths: Earth A, in the solar system, and Earth B, which long ago flew to the other side of the Milky Way. Earth A is now a “megaslum of several billion robots /…blue and green faded.” Earth B, on the other hand, is allegedly a place where life and colors have returned: “Forests and waters are abundant / Flowers birds animals are luscious / People wear figured rainbow silk / and talk with dance and song.”115 Desperate to leave Earth A, the speaker finally receives an immigrant visa from Earth B; Earth B tells him he can “come back [to Earth B] anytime,” so he decides to travel there on Halley's Comet. Noteworthy here is the speaker's claim that he will be “returning” (kaeru) to Earth B; that he sees himself as returning not to Earth A, where he lives, but instead to a planet where he has not yet been, indicates his dissociation from his current home. “Snow Ocean” concludes as it began, with a brief stanza describing the speaker rowing in the “snow ocean” (yuki no umi), something he claims he will do until 2062, when the comet is next scheduled to appear.116 The individual featured in “Snow Ocean” is clearly ashamed by what people have done to the planet. He speaks of dropping his head in the presence of a rainbow, too embarrassed to confront it directly. But rather than advocate changes in behaviors, or even resolve to change his own, he instead says that he will spend the next seventy-five years with Icicles on my beard Snowshoes ski poles

snow ocean rowing snow ocean rowing117 He will simply row along, waiting to return to a place he has been only in his imagination. Accentuating his passivity is the poem's informational ambiguity about conditions on Earth A. Early in “Snow Ocean” the speaker declares the planet devastated, but he later indicates that he is waiting for his immigration visa not in a megaslum but in a national park that, although reshaped by people, is hardly beyond repair: Today Earth A Japonesia Daisetsuzan Sakhalin fir larch shade of forested land barely living oak Japanese poplar natural forest Page 422 → long-tailed tit Eurasian nuthatch jay flame of life lingering in their cute pupils northern red fox Eurasian red squirrel hare footprints written in the snow seen dimly human world tomorrow how118 “Natural” forests are simply scraping by, having been mostly replaced by forests planted by people, but the soil clearly is still capable of nourishing vegetation. Likewise, although birds of various species appear to be in some distress, life lingers in their eyes. So there is some hope of remediation. Even so, the speaker yells desperately to Earth B to sanction his travel. As in Sakaki's poem “This Flower,” shame at what people have done to the nonhuman leads not to a resolve to rectify behaviors but to a powerful desire to abscond, whether to a nearby riverside or a faraway planet. Sakaki's texts are oddly captivating emblems of a larger corpus of environmentally escapist literature in East Asia and the world. Neither “This Flower” nor “Snow Ocean” discusses the consequences of such avoidance, although these can be readily imagined. In contrast, a number of creative works—including the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao's prose poem “Haru wa akebono” (Spring Dawn, 1994) and the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong's novel Yellow Peril (1991)—take the opposite approach, portraying environmentalists not as fleeing ecodegradation but instead as among the world's most destructive individuals. Although fantastical, these parodies warn not only against extreme environmentalism but also against placing too much confidence in environmental groups to repair ecosystems effectively.119 “Spring Dawn” highlights the hypocrisy of a group of extraterrestrial environmentalists. Reminiscent of the classic science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, 2008), in this prose poem Black Angels (; burakku enzeru)—a superhuman people representing environmentalists from outside Japan angry at that nation's exploitation of foreign resources—avenge Japan's worldwide destruction of ecosystems.120 But whereas in The Day the Earth Stood Still the alien environmentalists target people, believing they must be exterminated so that the planet can be saved, in “Spring Dawn” they annihilate trees and threaten to attack nuclear power plants. In doing so they depict behaviors destructive to the natural world as universal. “Spring Dawn” also explicitly degenders these alien environmentalists. The first indication comes from a Beijing radio flash, midmorning on April 8: “Their size and physique, like Japanese. They have no facial expressions and no sign of gender [seibetsu wa shiriy mo nai].”121 Similarly, the Page 423 →April 9 noon report from Japan's Inquiry Commission declares that the angels “have no sexual characteristics or function” (seiteki na tokuch to kin o motanai).122 And at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon the United Nations warns against negotiating with the Black Angels, emphasizing that “we cannot

bestow planet citizenship on a sexless and lifeless existence [seibetsu naku seimei no nai sonzai].”123 While exposing prejudices against individuals who do not map to one of the two recognized human genders, Sakaki's “Spring Dawn” also undermines stereotypes of female “innocence” and male “guilt” in transforming human and nonhuman environments. This destabilizing is reinforced in the poem's own description of “Japan,” rather than “Japanese men,” as responsible for destroying forests worldwide.124 Sakaki's text is dedicated to the early Japanese writer and court lady Sei Shnagon, best known for her Makura no s shi (Pillow Book, late tenth, early eleventh c.).125 Pillow Book begins with a paean to the spring dawn; the narrator declares daybreak the most beautiful attribute of the season and celebrates how it subtly colors distant hills. Echoing its predecessor, Sakaki's “Spring Dawn” likewise opens with the phrase “In spring it is the dawn,” followed by a note that “cherry blossoms are in mid-bloom, today is the Flower Festival [Buddha's Birthday], Friday, April 8.”126 But as with other literary works on ecodegradation that cite classical predecessors, “Spring Dawn” veers quickly from Sei Shnagon's verse.127 The following line describes a band of 1,200 chainsaw-winged angels descending on Japan, carrying a flag congratulating Japanese on the 1,200th anniversary of their former capital city Kyoto.128 The Japanese presume that the Black Angels have targeted them because they are world's largest consumer of trees, relentlessly turning trees to woodchips, woodchips to toilet paper, and then toilet paper to comic books; the Black Angels are particularly concerned with the damage Japan's demand for woodchips has done to Australia's primeval forests. Nothing can stop this rogue environmental group: not the Japanese riot police, not Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force, not even the United Nations Special Inquiry Commission Task Force. Oddly for an organization avenging destruction of environments, the Black Angels kidnap 1,200 Japanese cartoonists, perhaps as a protest against the resources commandeered by this profession, or perhaps simply because they are addicted to their manga and want these individuals in their service. Even more significantly, the Black Angels use their chainsaw wings to fell every tree in Japan—in forests, parks, private gardens, and along city streets. Unlike many creative texts on ecodegradation, “Spring Dawn” refers to this destruction tersely: “[April 8] 7:00 a.m. Parks, shrines, the imperial palace···, ancient forests, merciless…// 11:00 a.m.…1,200 angels with chainsaws Page 424 →for wings, dressed in black, invade Kyoto's forests…// 6:00 p.m. Spaceships land on stumps in bare [maruhadaka; lit. stark-naked] Maruyama Park, Shimogamo Shrine, and the imperial palace in Kyoto…All the trees and forests have been razed // [April 9] 9:00 p.m.…I walked around all day. All the trees at shrines, temples, and schools felled, felled to go to factories.”129 Maruyama Park , one of Kyoto's most popular sites for cherry blossom viewing, is now maruhadaka ( lit. stark naked; i.e., completely razed), like everywhere else in Japan. The consequences are immediately recognized, as are additional culprits: Bugs are chirping. Bats are flying. But how long will this continue? Our garden violets are in full bloom but without trees, what will become of them? Without trees, forests, and woodlands there’ll be no dragonflies, beetles, deer, or bears, and so we perhaps won't know the seasons. A world without trees, can we call it planet earth [ki ga nakunatta sekai tte, chiky tte yoberu n yaro ka]? We can only call it a mountain of concrete garbage [konkurto no gomi no yama, tada sore dake ya wa].130 Not only will plants and animals find it difficult to survive without trees, the world (sekai) itself risks losing its identity as planet earth (chiky; lit. soil sphere); its soil soiled and garbage exposed, round mountain (Maruyama) having become garbage mountain (gomi no yama), the planet now appears to consist more of human waste than of earth. Important as well is the broadening of focus from Japan to the world, suggesting that the Japanese are not the only people whose land will be flattened and not the only ones who have compromised their environments. The Black Angels do to Japanese ecosystems precisely what the Japanese have done to ecosystems on other continents. Moreover, the damage Japanese inflict on their own country is perhaps less obvious but likely no less lethal than the devastation wreaked by the Black Angels. To be sure, while Japanese consumption of trees is depicted as unjustified, rooted partially in desire to read comics, the Black Angels—who eat comics—indirectly depend on processed trees to survive. But “Spring Dawn” does not argue that this difference justifies complete destruction of environments. Instead, it reveals the avenging angels, whom it leaves circling above Japanese nuclear power plants, as in many ways just as culpable as the people they attack.

Providing an even more brazen parody of environmentalists is the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril, whose satires of deluded officialdom Page 425 →were examined in Chapter 6. In contrast, the present chapter is concerned with how this novel—through its devastating indictments of Ouyang Zhonghua (; lit. Europe Sun China), his China Green Rescue Association (Zhongguo Lüse Zhengjiu Xiehui), and this group's various “Green” ; offshoots—portrays environmental consciousness justifying extreme attitudes and ruinous behaviors. Also illustrating the failure of even megalomaniacs to avert global social and ecological collapse, this novel underscores the near impossibility of reversing present human habits of harming the environment and even of preventing total apocalypse. At the same time that his rhetoric makes a powerful case for rejecting “material people” (wuzhiren) in favor of what he brands “spiritual people” (jingshenren)—a likely critique of the increasing materialism of Deng Xiaoping's post–Cultural Revolution economic reforms—Ouyang also comes to believe that spiritual humanity will be possible only after the literal eradication, not just transformation, of material humanity. He is seemingly so committed to realizing a greener, more spiritual planet that he takes advantage of the collapse of China and other societies around the world to engage in exploits that cause needless human and nonhuman suffering. Ouyang's attitudinal conflicts are striking; he longs for a spiritual existence but also celebrates massive human casualties. His actions also are frequently contradictory. The China Green Rescue Association is responsible for developing shugua , a valuable substance that nourishes China's displaced population. By participating in such activities as the Green Exhibition, this organization also works to increase public awareness of the dangers of current lifestyles to environments, as well as introduces people to the joys of the more spiritual life. But at the same time, the Green Rescue Association establishes supposed survival bases that in fact are death traps for many. Most striking in this novel is the chasm between Ouyang's rhetorical advocacy of spiritual humanity on the one hand and his group's merciless destruction of people on the other. Ouyang's frequent justifications of death in the name of life, combined with the novel's depicting a nation and planet that appear beyond repair, make resolving the disparity between rhetoric and behavior exceptionally challenging. Like the world from which they are attempting to protect themselves, Ouyang and his organization become more outrageous as the novel progresses. Providing a foil in this novel for individuals advocating unchecked procreation, industrialization, and consumerism are others committed to an explicitly “Green” approach, including those embracing the Green Party (lüdang), Green Rescue Association, Green philosophy (lüse zhexue), Green Page 426 →religion (lüjiao), Green Exhibition, Green ideals (lüse lixiang), Green University (lüse daxue), even Greenpeace (Lüse Heping). Yet rather than depict green groups and their individual proponents as offering viable solutions to China's and the world's environmental crises, Yellow Peril highlights their hypocrisy and malice, the gulfs between their alleged beliefs and (the impacts of) their behaviors. The novel also ultimately underscores their fecklessness. Wang Lixiong's text depicts those committed to green lifestyles as professing concern for the welfare of people and the nonhuman yet consciously acting in ways detrimental to both. Green masks camouflage and justify injurious behaviors. The narrator remarks concerning the tyrannical Ouyang: He recognized that he was full of wild ambition, boundless wild ambition, capable of embracing the entire world…His ambition was not ordinary wild ambition that could be satisfied with power and honor…To be able to function he had to merge with the limitlessly immense. Large, largest, as large as the universe, that was he!…He wanted only the ultimate extreme; missing it by a step just wouldn't do. He had selected green [ta xuanze le lüse]. This is because he knew that it was humanity's only hope [nei shi renlei weiyi de xiwang]. Whoever grasped it first grasped the flagstick of the human future…He wanted only to change human history, to arrange the world anew [ta zhiyao gaibian renlei lishi, chongxin anpai shijie].131 Ouyang believes that green is not one of many possibilities but instead the world's only hope and that whoever controls it controls all humanity and has the potential literally to overturn human history. The world (Jpn. sekai; Chn. shijie) that Sakaki's poem “Spring Dawn” depicts as about to lose its planetary status here is taunted with the hope of a new beginning. The perfect disguise, green rhetoric for Ouyang is largely a means to power, not something in which he truly believes. On the other hand, the future society he envisions is not anathema to the green philosophy and in fact could not exist without it. Wang Lixiong's novel not only scathingly indicts

individuals and organizations most obviously responsible for degrading environments but also modulates the many shades of green. Yellow Peril initially portrays Ouyang and the Green Rescue Association as welcome presences in post–June Fourth (1989) Chinese society. Early in the novel the narrator notes that when political controls became severe after the Tiananmen demonstrations, the group assumed an especially important function even though just like the central government its real motives seemed suspect: Page 427 → The “China Green Rescue Association,” an organization that had as its alleged aims [biaomianshang] ecology and environmental protection [shengtai he huanbao], became the only domestic source capable of publicly announcing opinions that differed from those of the government. Its invariable concern was preventing the government from ripping off its mask [lianpi de bianyuan; lit. the edges of its face]. It thus was able to maintain itself and gradually developed national influence and received international attention. The year before, Ouyang Zhonghua had won the world Greenpeace Prize [lüseheping jiang]. In the most recent political upsurge the “Green Rescue Association” played only a moderate role. With the exception of declaring its support for redressing the June Four Incident [Tiananmen Incident], it did nothing to attract public attention and did not worry about the momentum being seized by new arrivals. [For its work as peacemaker between the two factions] the “Green Rescue Association” was respected by all sides.132 The narrator's comments that the Green Association has as it “alleged aims” ecology and environmental protection, that it works actively to prevent the government from ripping off its mask, and that it recently has permitted itself to be engulfed by new arrivals, about whose motives and aspirations the text remains notably silent, all suggest that this organization is not as “green” as it wants outsiders to believe. On the other hand, at this early juncture, Ouyang and the Green Rescue Association appear far more committed to environmental health than the Chinese government. Not only has Ouyang been accorded international recognition for his efforts to safeguard China's environment, he also recently was imprisoned for leading a protest against the severe damage caused by an accident at a nuclear power station.133 In fact, the novel's first reference to Ouyang is as a person jailed for environmental activism. The narrator returns to Ouyang several chapters later, after describing devastating floods along the Yellow River. Again, Ouyang is portrayed as conscious of environmental hypocrisy, this time manifested by the nongovernmental environmental organization Greenpeace; Ouyang develops his own environmental theories in direct response to what he believes to be Greenpeace's failed rhetoric. The novel notes that he became interested in the green movement during his earlier career as a writer. He admired the insights and objectives of Greenpeace, depicted in Yellow Peril as “coming from the West” (Greenpeace's first China office did not open until 1997, six years after the publication of Yellow Peril) and warning about ecological catastrophe, Page 428 →condemning the pursuit of limitless growth, industrialization, and consumerism, and urging self-control, respect for the fragile earth and other species (zunzhong cuiruo de diqiu he qita wuzhong), and the creation of a new mode of production and way of life. Ouyang agreed with these tenets but was frustrated with what he perceived as this organization's “extremely feeble and vague solutions”—the chasm between Greenpeace's pronouncements and its ability to effect environmental change. He believed strongly that To make people abandon in a single day the creation and consumption of material wealth, which had been the principal theme of human life for all of human history, would require more than empty words [kongdong cihui] such as “peace,” “intelligence,” and “return to nature” [huidao ziran]. Also worthless is making people feel satisfied with words urging restraint such as “morality,” “control,” and “self-control.”134

Ouyang hopes to change human history and arrange the world anew; he longs for the opportunity to transform “material society” (wuzhiren shehui) into “spiritual society” (jingshenren shehui). But he makes it clear that Greenpeace, with its “empty words,” will be of little help in this endeavor. His criticisms of Greenpeace are noteworthy considering this organization's history of radical environmentalism; Yellow Peril suggests that in a world on the brink of ecological collapse even rhetoric and behaviors that have been considered extreme are no longer sufficient. Greenpeace is not accused of actively harming environments, but Ouyang is convinced that nothing good can come from giving more attention to guidelines for behaviors than to behaviors themselves. Ouyang responds to Greenpeace's lexicon with “spirituality,” a term that has catapulted him to bestseller lists and bookshelves around the globe; a true work of world literature, his foundational text Jingshen ren (Spiritual People) has been translated into dozens of languages, and his theories allegedly have become a cornerstone of the international green movement (guoji lüse yundong). According to Ouyang, the future depends on material consumerism being superseded by spiritual aestheticism, material humanity becoming spiritual humanity, and material forms of life becoming spiritual forms of life. This is because, he argues, the “beauty” (mei) pursued by those committed to the spiritual life is a source of energy just as forceful, just as incessantly stimulating to human life as the desire for material wealth. At the same time, Ouyang's theories have some troubling loopholes and contradictions that make them even more suspect than the rhetoric of Greenpeace. Page 429 →First, Ouyang believes that “spirit” (jingshen) differentiates people and animals, that people have the ability to evolve into spiritual creatures whereas animals are forever grounded in the material world. Even today, we are only beginning to understand animal consciousness, and the narrator of Yellow Peril does not indicate whether Ouyang's comment actively rejects recent findings on this topic or stems from his ignorance. But Ouyang's perception that animals are less evolved than people indicates anthropocentrism that eventually is used to justify mistreatment of the nonhuman. Second, and more disturbing, are the parallels between Ouyang's quest for a spiritual life and people's pursuit of material wealth, which he is attempting to reverse. He claims that because the search for a spiritual life is “not confined by resources” (bushou ziyuan xianzhi) there are literally “no limits to growth.” Ouyang also asserts that the principal objective of the new society will be the “constant heightening of people's spiritual life”; people will be most satisfied by “pursuing the demands of unceasing progress.”135 To be sure, Ouyang makes clear that in the society of the future, material life, while allowing people to be “warmly dressed and well fed,” also will be maintained at a level that conforms to available resources; spiritual growth will not come at the expense of environmental health. He likewise justifies his emphasis on the ceaseless development of spirituality by presenting it as redirecting into a less damaging course what has been deemed unalterable: the human need always to be pursuing something, whether tangible or intangible. Even so, it remains uncertain not only how definitively spiritual quests will be divided from their material counterparts but also what constitutes being “warmly fed and well dressed” and what it actually means to “conform to the environment.” Also unclear is what will happen when spiritual and material objectives collide, as seems inevitable. Finally, the narrator notes that despite the worldwide influence of Ouyang's book, he refuses to take part in the many debates surrounding it, particularly those concerning the proposed transforming of material humanity into spiritual humanity. His silence stems not from the belief that he has nothing to learn from others’ opinions. Instead, he feels that being a celebrity prevents him from talking freely, from saying anything unassailable. He believes in spiritual humanity strongly enough to write about it but not to debate it with others and develop more effective strategies. Yellow Peril reveals the ambiguities of Ouyang's green philosophy even before China's expected massive ecological and social collapse. Implementing beliefs and rhetoric proves to be an even more convoluted process. Immediately after describing Ouyang's convictions, the narrator reveals that the recent massive human suffering caused by breached dikes and Page 430 →unprecedented flooding along the Yellow River “appears to be an opportunity [shiji] for which Ouyang's been waiting.”136 Rather than aspiring to reform contemporary society, which has long adhered to behaviors harmful to environments, Ouyang has yearned for a virtual tabula rasa. Understandably, he believes that simply stepping back and allowing people to become spiritual of their own accord will take millennia, by which time green policies will be meaningless because the planet already will have been destroyed dozens of times over.

Moreover, Ouyang is certain that even if he were to work industriously under normal circumstances, he would not see results within his lifetime and would have to entrust his life's work to posterity, something he is loath to do. Complete calamity, such as the floods China just experienced, is by far the best scenario for allowing him to embark on his project. So Ouyang parachutes into the flood zone, targeting an island where people are temporarily isolated from outside political, economic, and social forces and where he believes he can successfully propagate his green religion. Asserting many parallels between the principles of the “green life” and conventional Chinese values including “ardently loving nature” (reai ziran), he believes the stranded citizenry will be easy converts.137 Discovering to his dismay that the people here have no interest in such matters, within hours he loses all hope and begins longing for a more dramatic collapse of society. Ouyang drifts off into reverie: “If material ‘people’ couldn't become spiritual ‘people’ the world was condemned to destruction [huimie]. He had worked hard, but from early on had thought destruction could not be avoided…A new idea came to him. Destruction and the green future [huimie he lüse weilai] would go hand in hand, and death [siwang] would link these two hands.”138 Ironically it is a voice of life, not death, that brings his mind back to the scene at hand, that of a young woman urging him to eat dinner. But Ouyang remains obsessed with death and obliteration: Things here would run their course. Since destruction [huimie] was inevitable, since destruction was necessary for new life [xinsheng], let destruction come as soon as possible. Accelerating destruction was spurring the advance of history. Since they were about to die, since it was only after the complete annihilation of the material people [wuzhiren de damie] that the spiritual age [jingshen shidai] could begin, the death of these people had a kind of ice-cold destiny. To save them would be to go against history.139 As Ouyang's repetition of “destruction” suggests, he has undergone a dramatic conversion. Unable to sway the minds of populations devastated by Page 431 →flooding, he changes rapidly from encouraging people to “be pure of heart and have few desires,” “be content with your lot,” and “love nature” instead to promoting annihilation. Incapable of reconciling his vision of the future with the realities of the present, he believes total cataclysm a prerequisite for reform. Once longing himself to “change history,” he now is devoted to helping destiny take its course. Even more striking than the speed and entirety of Ouyang's conversion is the contrast between his preoccupation with his personal security and his complaint that people are too obsessed with their own comfort to sacrifice anything for the future.140 His obsession leads him to initiate brutality that rivals and at times exceeds the violence of the very entities whose obliteration he believes necessary and inevitable. In his new book Nirvana Ouyang repeats his assertion that destroying the present world is desirable because it will hasten the arrival of its much improved counterpart; he envisions “a completely new world being created on the ruins of the old world” (jiu shijie de feixushang yunyu yige quanxin shijie).141 But he also recognizes that if this new world of spiritual humanity is actually to materialize some people from the current world must be saved. So Ouyang proposes that select individuals be chosen to function as its progenitors, preferably “spiritual people with a good education who have a high degree of intelligence and good measure of self-control.”142 It is these people, fearful that the terrors of the old world will be repeated, who will forever exercise self-restraint in everything they do, from reproducing and learning to producing and living. In other words, not only do Ouyang and the Green Association take no steps to prevent the demolition of contemporary society, they actively encourage it, while sparing themselves and a chosen few. Replacing “material humanity” with “spiritual humanity” thus has less to do with transforming consciousness than with eliminating those who are not already “spiritual people.”143 A complication is that “spiritual humanity” will quickly vanish in a collapsing material world; those who allegedly live the life of the mind and privilege the soul will be unable to endure what some call a deteriorating animal existence in an animal world. In this sense, Ouyang and his colleagues in the Green Association practice what they preach. The government allows them to establish six experimental bases to test their theories. Although known to the public as Nature Protection Regions (ziran baohuqu), these spaces in fact become sites of considerable violence; those in charge, and Ouyang in particular, demonstrate little if any spirituality or self-control.

The greater the chaos in the world outside his nature reserves, the greater Ouyang's megalomania. He initially makes it clear to his followers that although they should stop at nothing, including violence, to protect themselves Page 432 →from invaders, they are not to leave the compounds to attack others. But as he develops a political party, additional bases, an army, and even a university, his “violence principle” soon evolves into committing physical assaults; violence becomes common not only outside the walls surrounding the bases, as thousands of undesirables attempt to burst inside, but also within the compounds themselves.144 When Ouyang's girlfriend Chen Pan visits him at one of the nature reserves, she notes how forbidding they have become and realizes that her own future is in jeopardy: “The former ‘Beauty Bases’ [the nature reserves of the Green Association] had become [under the control of the Green Party] ice-cold subsistence bases…This was thanks to Ouyang's aspirations of becoming God [shangdi]. According to the standards he had instituted as God, she would be eliminated.”145 Ouyang does not dispose of her immediately, but he does inform her that he is more qualified than God to choose survivors. And so when she demands—“Ouyang Zhonghua, let me see you shoot someone! Let me see how you are as a butcher! Let me see your pursuit of beauty and Green ideals!”—he willingly obliges until her universe turns dark.146 Chen Pan survives but leaves the base, heading to an almost certain death. Since nature has already been virtually destroyed and the planet enveloped by nuclear winter, most of the green army's victims are people.147 But one of the novel's final sections, titled “Nature Reserve—Dog Pens,” depicts violence to both humans and animals so atrocious that the dissonance between green ideals and green practices could hardly be more vivid. The narrator notes that the dog enclosure was wholly Ouyang's idea and that he knows well what happens there, but because he is too ashamed of the horrors he has unleashed, he has no desire to see the pen for himself. The base feeds human corpses to the dogs it is raising for food; many of these corpses are of people who have perished trying to enter the reserve. Ouyang has commissioned mentally and physically disabled individuals to staff the pen, since no one else is willing to perform such work. In “Nature Reserve—Dog Pens,” Ouyang operates the pen himself. He corrals the despised Green Guards, who have raped women and beaten and needlessly executed people of both genders, and puts them in a pen with a young woman and a rabid dog. The Green Guards are excited, expecting they can watch the dog and woman copulate. But instead, Ouyang releases 150 dogs on the guards, resulting in the deaths of all of the men and most of the dogs. Ouyang is thrilled at this turn of events, believing himself master of the world. Yet still unsatisfied, he rapes the woman and unleashes the remaining dogs on a worker who witnessed the attack. Suddenly terrified of what he has done and blurring boundaries between people and animals, Ouyang asks, “Had he truly become a wild Page 433 →animal? …Did the blood and flesh all around him indicate human defeat of wild animals or the defeat of wild animals by wild animals?”148 Whereas he earlier had declared that people's ability to evolve into spiritual creatures separated them from animals, he now recognizes that human and nonhuman might not be so different after all. Even more alarming than Ouyang's transformation from an individual advocating “spiritual humanity” into a “wild animal” is his utter powerlessness to forestall complete social and ecological collapse. As megalomaniacal as he is, as carefully as he has designed his survival bases, he is unable to assemble an adequate force to protect his chosen spiritualists from the thousands of starving, desperate people storming the barriers. His actions make talk of “spiritual humanity” replacing “material humanity” appear ludicrous. Deceived by his own security forces, he seems to stand virtually alone. The final section of the novel portrays a single unidentified man walking across a desolate earth; it is possible but unlikely that this man is Ouyang. Instead, the novel suggests that he has simply disappeared, like so many others. He and his dystopia have evaporated into nothingness. Ouyang and his green movement obviously caricature not only some of China's unavailing protest movements but also more generally the extremes to which individuals and organizations will go to further their own agendas. Unlike Sakaki's Black Angels, who destroy ecosystems on a vast scale, Ouyang is not ultimately responsible for the planetary apocalypse described in Yellow Peril. And this ecological collapse appears more hyperbole than an accurate forecast of the chaos likely to descend on the globe if environmental concerns are not addressed more responsibly and effectively. But even so, the parodies of environmental activism in Wang Lixiong's novel significantly amplify many of the same concerns voiced in Sakaki's poem “Spring Dawn,” highlighting the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in any attempt to transform both mental and physical landscapes. Forming significant intercultural conceptual networks, much literature on environmental degradation reveals, in however exaggerated and parodic form, contradictions between professed attitudes and actual behaviors toward

the environment. In doing so these writings expose the eternal gaps between human aspirations and concrete actions. They also suggest that to aspire to something better even as we undermine our own lives and that of the nonhuman is part of the essence of being human. Far from resolving the ecological conundrums it describes, most literature on environmental distress further ambiguates these ambiguities, bringing to light deeper discrepancies. In fact, poetry and prose regularly counter the Page 434 →unstable, inverted pyramids of environmental Ponzi schemes with their own mushrooming miasmas of environmental ambiguity. Creative writing often makes matters even more confusing by remaining silent about its uncertainties: many narrators and characters seem unaware of the discrepancies they depict or exhibit. Indeed, to the extent that they are aware of them, people often suppress the contradictions of their interactions with environments.149 Analyses of literature can provide sharp lenses for deeper insight into processes of environmental degradation by highlighting creative articulations of these disjunctions. Better appreciating the uncertainties and contingencies of ecodegradation in literature, and in life, should allow for more productive relationships among people and the natural world. By teasing out intercultural conceptual networks of ecoambiguity, this book has brought to light the tremendous variety of writing that engages with ecological challenges in East Asia and beyond. Just as important, it has argued for more fluidity and flexibility in literature scholarship. Ecoambiguity proposes not only that we look more closely at how individual literatures address urgent matters of global concern but also that we consider literary negotiations with these issues regardless of the national corpus to which the texts belong. In other words, this book suggests that even as we probe deeper into cultural contexts we do more to use topics and concepts as the bases of analysis. How we conceptualize global problems such as poverty, slavery, disease, and environmental degradation is enriched by examining the multiple literatures of world regions and, to the extent possible, multiple regions and ultimately the globe. Analyzing literary treatments of these phenomena as expressed in various languages and cultural settings leads to clearer understanding of shared problems and a better basis for resolving them. This is not to deny the importance of cultural specificity; it is crucial to be familiar with the local and national contexts in which literature is produced. And it is certainly true that even as literatures become more global they often become more national. But beyond focusing on what is written in particular languages or cultural spheres, we also should analyze how literatures from multiple sites treat shared phenomena found in one form or another across the world. The shift is in many cases subtle: for example, from studying how Japanese and Chinese literatures discuss pollution to examining literary engagement with pollution by incorporating examples from several cultures, including Chinese and Japanese. But when we change frames of reference the shift is nearly always significant: we start not with China, Japan, or any individual nation or people but instead with the global problem of pollution. The shift is even more significant when the focus is concepts (e.g., ecoambiguity) rather than topics (e.g., pollution). Moving the spotlight away from looking Page 435 →solely at what narratives tell us about specific peoples and cultures to what they also reveal about widespread human and nonhuman phenomena—in this case abuse to people and the natural world writ large—helps us break down barriers of isolation, insularity, and exceptionalism. Such an approach allows for new understandings, insights, and interpretations of cultural processes across time and space. Creative negotiations with ecological destruction tend to open themselves or be more easily opened to the world than discourse on other global problems. Such texts speak bluntly about global apocalypse, or they liken conditions in one place to conditions half a world away, or they focus on the traumas inflicted on a particular space or nonhuman body that might infiltrate or be located or duplicated in any number of sites.150 In both their origins and their outlooks these and similar literary strategies can increase planetary consciousness. This is true even if texts have not traveled far themselves, neither translated, intertextualized, discussed, or even available in more than one literary space. It is true even if they are written in a language not frequently translated or even known by many outside a particular place. Literature on ecological devastation, no matter its cultural and environmental origins, regularly reaches out to the broader world. And so too should the literary critic. Discourse on environmental and disciplinary crises abounds. Many contend that ecological calamities are likely to

be the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. Many also argue that literature scholarship and the humanities more generally are in flux.151 These dilemmas will not be easily resolved. But scholarship on individual cultures provides vital foundations for comprehending specific contexts of ecological abuse. The fields of comparative and particularly world literature help us appreciate more fully how creative writing and scholarship on creative writing can both reinforce and defy national, cultural, linguistic, geopolitical, and ecological divisions. Ecocriticism and other branches of environmental humanities demonstrate especially clearly the exciting possibilities for humanistic intervention in ecodegradation. Yet there is much work to be done. Without abandoning our time-honored approaches, humanists need to collaborate more with one another to expand our cultural and disciplinary scopes, incorporating more diverse materials and methodologies even while nurturing expertise in new and specific areas. Ideally, working with colleagues in the social, physical, and life sciences, we can develop deeper connections among disciplines with the ultimate aims of embracing more fully the wider world—culturally, geographically, biophysically—and of analyzing how the cultural products to whose study we devote our professional lives do the same.

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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. http://www.shosenkyo-kankoukyokai.com/b/. Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park is mainly in Yamanashi Prefecture, approximately two hours west of Tokyo. 2. For clarity, and to highlight the impacts that human behaviors have on the planeta's abiotic and nonhuman biotic components, in this book the terms “environment,” “ecosystem,” “landscape,” “surroundings,” and “bodyscape” are used to refer to spaces with a significant nonhuman presence. The term “bodyscape” calls attention to the fact that most spaces contain a variety of interdependent bodies, which are themselves ecosystems. Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence. In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo stresses the transcorporeality of bodies human and otherwise. See also Thongchai Winichakul's discussion of the geobody in Siam Mapped and Arjun Appadurai's analysis of various scapes in “Disjuncture and Difference.” Conversations with Julia Adeney Thomas clarified the importance of bodies and bodyscapes in conceptualizations of the planet. Cf. Andrew Bernstein, “Weathering Fuji,” 8; Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape, 3. The terms “nonhuman”/“the nonhuman”—used relatively interchangeably in this book with “natural world, ” “nature,” “nonhuman world,” and “nonhuman entities”—indicate (communities of) nonhuman biotic and abiotic entities. The nonhuman biotic includes nonhuman animals (referred to in this book simply as animals), plants, and other organisms, while the abiotic includes geophysical bodies such as air, water, and soil, as well as chemical elements. These terms also include the (in)tangible cultural artifacts of nonhuman animals, from chimpanzee tools and beaver dams to agency, pain, attachment, memory, and other states of consciousness experienced by animals, as these have been interpreted by people. As Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger argue in “Approaching the Agency of Other Animals,” “no matter how we consider agency [and consciousness], the result is that either humans are more like the other animals or the other animals are more like humans than we have comfortably thought in the past” (8). For more on animal consciousness see Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff, Species of Mind; Emily Anther, “Soft-Headed Intellectuals”; Marc Bekoff et al., eds., The Cognitive Animal; Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals; J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace; J. M. Coetzee, ed., The Lives of Animals; Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds; Cary Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human.” Some scholars prefer the term “more-than-human” to “nonhuman,” believing it does a better job of defining animals, plants, and Page 438 →geophysical entities by what they are rather than by what they are not. See, for instance, David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous. Many spaces are of course composed almost entirely of people and their (in) tangible cultural products. Tangible human cultural products include any constructed material entity, including machines, robots, buildings, and artistic creations such as paintings, sculptures, and written literature. Likewise, as scholarship on posthumanism has demonstrated, boundaries between people and their creations are often constructed. See Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”; Neil Badmington, Alien Chic; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen; Cary Wolfe, What is Post-humanism? Cf. Barry Commoner, Making Peace, which distinguishes between the “manmade technosphere” and the “natural ecosphere” (7). Ashlee Vance discusses the BrinBot (an early experiment in the effortless and elegant merging of people and machines) in “Merely Human?” For the animal as cyborg see Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, “The Horse as Technology.” Intangible cultural bodies include intangible human constructions such as beliefs (religious and otherwise), biases, emotions, ideals, ideas, languages, memories, perceptions, theories, and thoughts, as well as arts such as song, dance, and oral literature. The concepts of “nature” and “natural world” often are seen as retrograde; humans and their cultural artifacts are so deeply integrated with the nonhuman that distinguishing between the two often appears at best misleading and at worst, in the words of Harold Fromm, “wholly factitious”: “There is not and never

has been such a thing as ‘the environment.’ Nothing ‘surrounds’ a human being who is made of some special substance that can be distinguished from the ‘surroundings.’ There is only one congeries of earthly substance, and it comprises everything from eukaryotes to Albert Einstein.…There is no environment, only an ensemble of elements recycled through every existing thing.” Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human, 189–90. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton highlights the interconnectedness, the ecological entanglement of all beings, constructs, and objects. On the other hand, there is no denying that human behaviors have harmed other species and the natural world more generally, no matter the molecular and other similarities and interconnections; as the physiciannarrator in the Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi's (1931-) Mudhakkirt tabbah (Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, 1958) marvels while holding a human brain: “Could this piece of moist tender flesh be the mighty human mind that had triumphed over nature and gone down into the bowels of the earth and up into orbit with the sun and the moon, which could split rocks and move mountains and extract enough fire from atoms to destroy the world?” (28). In this book I use the terms “nonhuman,” “nature,” etc. not to establish a hierarchy between people and everything else, nor to suggest that people are intrinsically separate from everything else, but instead to highlight the role of people in harming other species and the abiotic. See also Gay A. Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge; Matthew Calarco, Zoographies; Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents, 168; Ian Frederick Finseth, Shades of Green, 3–4; Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human, 95–103; Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, 3–4; Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology, Page 439 →147–48; Richard White, The Organic Machine. Helpful sources on cross-cultural conceptions of “nature” include Hubertus Tellenbach and Bin Kimura, “The Japanese Concept of ‘Nature’”; Arne Kalland, “Culture in Japanese Nature”; Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature; Peter Marshall, Nature's Web; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature; Kate Soper, What is Nature?; Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity. For a discussion of changing conceptions of the relationship between people and “nature,” see Michael Bonnett, Retrieving Nature, esp. 26–41. For different understandings of the term “environment” see Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies. 3. On the other hand, as Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee points out in Postcolonial Environments, the list of crimes against people committed in the name of “preserving nature” continues to grow, from the “ethnic cleansing” of Yellowstone National Park to violence in India against refugees for the alleged purpose of protecting tiger habitats (41). 4. To give one example, to help restore forests razed by grazing deer in Japan's Tanzawa Mountains the Kanagawa prefectural government has increased efforts to cull the animals. On the other hand, environmentalists have argued that also responsible for degrading these wooded ecosystems are air pollution and growing numbers of hikers, as well as a wasp species that consumes beech leaves. “Tanzawa Forests Endangered.” 5. For many millennia most human-induced changes to environments were relatively isolated local phenomena, but in the past several centuries these changes have expanded into regional and ultimately global events. The greater the human transformations of an environment, particularly its nonhuman components, the more likely it is that this environment is regarded as damaged or in crisis. Since the 1960s many have argued that the planet itself is in crisis, in large part because of human behaviors. As Ernst Friedrich Schumacher writes in Small is Beautiful (1973), “Already the environment is trying to tell us that certain stresses are becoming excessive. As one problem is being ‘solved,’ ten new problems arise as a result of the first ‘solution’” (43). For more on perceptions of environmental crisis, see Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life. James Gustave Speth comments on the paradox of the precipitous decline of environmental health in face of the increasing strength of environmental institutions and movements since the 1970s in “Environmental Failure.” Richard C. Hoffmann et al. discuss definitions of environmental “crisis” in “AHR Conversation.” See also Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 7; Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 93–107; Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power, 265–72. 6. Julia A. Ireland, “Annie Dillard's Ecstatic Phenomenology,” 32. Ireland is referring to a phrase in the

American writer Annie Dillard's (1945-) Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), in which she reflects on her year alone at Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and expounds on the wonders of nature: “Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the Page 440 →first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance…I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam” (33). 7. David P. Barash, “We Are All Madoffs,” B8. 8. See, for instance, Robert Bryce, Power Hungry. 9. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe ecological life narratives as texts in which “the story of the protagonist is interwoven with that of the region itself” (150). 10. James Engell, “Plant Beach Grass,” 23. Paul R. Ehrlich and Donald Kennedy are among the many scholars and activists who, alarmed at increasing damage to environments, have called explicitly for cultural change. See their “Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior,” 563. Michael Bonnet argues that environmental education, properly conceived, “requires a radical transformation of the nature of schooling and a re-examination of the idea of education itself.” Michael Bonnet, Retrieving Nature, 4. Mary Evelyn Tucker notes the increasing awareness of scientists and policymakers that science and policy are necessary but “not sufficient in helping to transform human consciousness and behavior for a sustainable future.” Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Preface,” 3. As Shirley M. Tilgh-man, a celebrated molecular biologist and president of Princeton University, declared at the university's 2010 Opening Exercises: “Within the next few decades, sustainable life on our planet will require that we discover alternative forms of energy and ways to ameliorate the damage that has already been done to our ecosystem. At first blush you might think that this is the sole task of future engineers and scientists, but nothing could be further from the truth. The development of new energy sources and protection of the environment are challenges that call out for expertise in everything from moral philosophy to legislative policymaking to behavioral economics, in addition to…science and engineering.” Shirley M. Tilghman, “Welcoming the Class of 2014.” 11. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, vi. Jerry Varsava also reminds us of the importance of art's broad commercial appeal: “there is a capacity for ameliorative influence in the literary work of art that, however sadly, is not available to natural and social scientists whose readership is counted in, perhaps, the hundreds, rather than [in some cases] in the millions” (296). Jerry Varsava, “Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem,” 296. Scholars making the case for environmental humanities—including anthropology, ethics, history, humanistic geography, and religion—include Jill Ker Conway et al., “The New Environmentalisms”; Leo Marx, “Environmental Degradation.” For more on the “use” of literature, see Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature. 12. George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits, 6. As Mark Allister notes in Refiguring the Map of Sorrow, a common feature of many texts that intersect at the edges of autobiography studies, environmental literature, and literary nonfiction is the desire of their writers “to explore the world and tell its stories as an attempt to make sense of their own lives” (170). 13. Njabulo S. Ndebele (1948-), South African Literature and Culture, 134. As Lawrence Buell likewise asserts, “Narrative can both define and underscore the gravity of actual or possible events by means of plotlines involving characters Page 441 →the reader…is made to care about intensely…How a place gets imaged, what stories about it get told, how they are remembered-all this can clearly make a difference not just aesthetically but historically, for public values and behavior.” Lawrence Buell, “Literature and the Environment,” 60–61. 14. As James William Gibson has noted, “new ways of understanding and relating to nature have preceded actual political changes,” sometimes by decades. See James William Gibson, A Reenchanted World, 253. 15. In Don DeLillo's (1936-) White Noise the narrator observes: “The people who relayed…pieces of unverified information [on the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’] did so with a certain respectful dread…They were fearful that the stories might be true but at the same time impressed by the dramatic character of things. The toxic event had released a spirit of imagination. People spun tales, others listened spellbound. There was a growing respect for the vivid rumor, the most chilling tale. We were no closer to believing or disbelieving a

given story than we had been earlier. But there was a greater appreciation now. We began to marvel at our own ability to manufacture awe” (153). For its part Günter Grass's (1927-) The Rat parodies the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of fairy tales in the context of environmental degradation. 16. George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits, 51. 17. Documentary sources include government reports as well as journalistic, scientific, and medical articles /information, some of which rely heavily on statistics. Precision does not guarantee fact and truth; it only reflects the desire to appear as though fact and truth have been prioritized. 18. This relates at least in part to literature's “usability.” As Rita Felski urges: “Instead of calling literature useful, let us call it ‘usable’—a word that better captures its chameleonlike ability to speak to diverse interests and desires, to morph into different roles and functions.” Rita Felski, “Remember the Reader,” B8. See also Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, 7–8. Significant as well is that most texts that feature damage to ecosystems base their discussions on phenomena in the experienced world; many of these texts engage with actual environmental problems and crises, explicitly or implicitly interweaving documentary sources into their narratives. Creative works often highlight the contradictions and fluctuations of this nonfiction discourse. They explicitly and implicitly underline the inability of documentary sources to capture suffering, whether of people or the nonhuman. Even more important, they reveal the ambiguous and often controversial ways information is assembled, interpreted, and distributed, the very ways that knowledge itself is constructed by individuals and by social institutions and societies. For discussions of the usability of literature and stories in changing people's interactions with environments, see Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth; William Cronon, “A Place for Stories”; George B. Handley, New World Poetics, 8; Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature; Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer, “Heading Off the Trail”; S. K. Robisch, Wolves and the Wolf Myth, xii; Keith Sagar, Literature and the Crime against Nature; Terre Satterfield and Scott Slovic, eds., What's Nature Worth? 61–81. Bate, for instance, notes the paradox of art itself: “art is an attempt to recover the very thing which has been destroyed [raw materials] so that art can be made” (92). Page 442 → 19. Although the two frequently overlap, attitudes are best understood as mental states and behaviors as actions we carry out toward other entities, including the nonhuman. Barbara Almond, The Monster Within, 8. 20. Understandings of what constitutes ambiguity vary from culture to culture, as well as within individual cultures, but the term ecoambiguity captures well the dynamics of a diverse range of texts, including those discussed in this book. Cf. Josef A. Kyburz, “Magical Thought at the Interface of Nature and Culture.” Commenting on the long history—from the sixteenth century to the present day—of Western reports on the “ambiguity” of “Japanese attitudes toward nature,” Kyburz comments, “Deep familiarity, closeness and intimacy with the natural environment are seen to coexist, without apparent contradiction, with just as much careless neglect, disregard or abuse. But what appears to be a contradictory or paradoxical attitude, might, on the antipodean side, be nothing else than a spontaneous, ‘natural’ expression of a relationship so profoundly different from its Western equivalent that it needs a complete change of perspective in order to be perceived and fittingly interpreted” (257–58). I argue instead that the “natural” expression of human relationships with environments is often ambiguous, regardless of culture. Beliefs concerning ideal relationships between people and environments can differ widely across and within cultures, but behaviors toward these environments—given similar populations and capability to manipulate landscapes—have been strikingly similar. 21. Cf. Clive Ponting, A New Green History, 15–16. 22. Jared Diamond, Collapse, 9. J. R. McNeill believes human manipulations of the planet's ecosystems have taken place for much longer. See J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 3. Some scientists have gone so far as to argue that people triggered global warming thousands of years ago. See Josh Fischman, “Global Warming before Smokestacks,” B11–12. 23. Bill McKibben argues that altering distant places “[began] with the invisible releases of radiation, and then the toxic pollutants like DDT, and then the by-products of large-scale industrialization like acid rain.” Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, xix. But in fact, people have been altering distant places long before radiation, DDT, and acid rain. 24. See Kamila Shamsie, “Not Just a Natural Disaster.” Shamsie describes illegal deforestation in the Swat valley of north Pakistan as responsible for the record floods that in 2010 devastated the region: “not only

has the flooding been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by torrents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in their path.” In Island in a Storm Abby Sallenger reveals the impact of human changes to the Mississippi delta on patterns of disease and vulnerability to hurricanes. An excellent contemporary example of an animal whose population has exploded because of human behaviors is the mountain pine beetle, an insect that kills mature trees. In recent years the beetle has damaged 6 million acres of forest in the United States and 34 million acres in British Columbia. Some see this as an “unmitigated disaster.” Others argue that the beetles are not an exotic or invasive species, that “this is a native insect in a native host,” and that the attack on Western forests is a “natural phenomenon” which plays a “vital ecological role.” But Page 443 →global warming, by opening up new territory to the beetles, has been blamed for the severity and scope of the attacks. See Jim Robbins, “Some See Beetle Attacks on Western Forests as a Natural Event,” D3. Cf. Anthony dePalma, “An Unsightly Algae,” D3. More “natural” devastation might be the nearly 600 square kilometers of forest flattened by the eruption of Mount St. Helens. 25. Clive Ponting, A New Green History, 31–34. 26. As late as the 1500s, hunters and gatherers occupied all of Australia, most of North America, and large segments of Africa, Asia, and South America. By the turn of the twentieth century most foraging societies had been absorbed into surrounding agricultural regimes, but dozens were still viable; the turn of the twenty-first century saw all such societies assimilated into agrarian state systems, but some—like the Rautes of Nepal—remain relatively independent. Jana Fortier, Kings of the Forest, 1. See also James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 27. Clive Ponting, A New Green History, 67–86. Also discussing environmental degradation in ancient societies are Louise Barry, “Water, Power, Technology”; Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth; Jan J. Boersema, “First the Jew”; Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History; Barry Commoner, Science and Survival; Jared Diamond, Collapse; Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal; Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore; A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe; Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should a Person Consume? 2–4; J. Donald Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations and Pan's Travail; Heather Pringle, “A New Look at the Mayas’ End”; John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier; Derek Wall, Green History, 2–3. 28. World human population has more than doubled in the last fifty years, from 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion in 2011. Managing growing populations has been a challenge for centuries. See Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Jared Diamond, Collapse; Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb; Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal; Paul R. Ehrlich et al., Ecoscience; Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny; J. Donald Hughes, Pan's Travail, 36; Karen L. Kilcup, “Fresh Leaves”; Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier; Elaine Scarry, Literature and the Body; Bill McKibben, Maybe One; Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think, 157–63; Gary Snyder, A Place in Space, 32–33; Jacqueline Vaughn, Environmental Politics; Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” 29. As Elizabeth Kolbert argues in “The Things People Say” concerning the “birther conspiracy” surrounding President Barack Obama (1961-), “Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less” (80–81). See also Joe Keohane, “How Facts Backfire”; Cass Sunstein, Infotopia, On Rumors, and Republic.com 2.0. As Keohane notes, “Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts—inference, intuition, and so forth—to avoid precisely [the] discomfort [of relentless self-questioning] while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without these shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we're easily suckered by political falsehoods” (C3). 30. Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence, 25, 74. 31. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, 1–2. Bodies Page 444 →of water such as Africa's Lake Tanganyika are at their warmest in more than a millennium, threatening global food supplies. See “Lake Tanganyika.” Others have predicted that the rapid disappearance of honeybee colonies on multiple continents puts the planet on the brink of a biological disaster and threatens the stability of human societies. Alison Benjamin, “Bee Decline a Calamity for Humanity.” In its 2010 report on global biodiversity, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity claimed that nearly a quarter of all plant species

are threatened. 2010 was declared the International Year of Biodiversity, but biodiversity is threatened now more than ever before. See “U.N. Report.” For maps indicating global distribution of contemporary environmental problems see E. O. Wilson, “Problems without Borders”; www.worldmapper.org. 32. James Gustave Speth, “Environmental Failure”; Mark Dowie, Losing Ground; Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through. As Richard Kerridge has likewise noted, “Popular concern about the environment finds numerous cultural expressions…At times environmentalism seems to be everywhere—yet environmental priorities make so little political headway, so little impression on economic life. It is as if environmentalism has been defined…as a purely cultural practice, or even a leisure activity…Whether in the lives of individuals or in social policy, environmentalism has great difficulty in moving beyond these cultural spheres.” Richard Kerridge, “Ecothrillers,” 247. See also Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien, 3–34; John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation. 33. Jared Diamond, Collapse, 11. 34. Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 4. See also, Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” 207–8. 35. Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” 219. See also, Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 129. The definition of biophilia is from Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic.” See also Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia. Wilson echoes the American naturalist John Muir's (1838–1914) sentiments, in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), that “the natural inherited wilderness in our blood ran true on its glorious course…We have to look far back to learn how great may be the capacity of a child's heart for sorrow and sympathy with animals” (4–6). Muir disputed the English intellectual John Ruskin's (1819–1900) cautions against “excessive love” of mountains, but the two agreed “that a love of mountains was instilled in every person.” Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature, 5–6, 187–88. Cf. Xing Ruan and Paul Hogben, eds., Topophilia and Topophobia. 36. As Martin W. Lewis argues in Green Delusions, indifference toward environments often contributes to their health. 37. Cf. Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” 211. Estok believes the focus on ecophobia is a needed antidote to ecocriticism's own ambivalences and ambiguities: “A viable ecocriticism has little future unless it deals with the ambivalence dragged in by its wide net—needs, in other words, to begin theorizing its central matter of concern: ecophobia.” In contrast, I argue that ambivalence, or ambiguity more generally—albeit that of the relationships between people and the nonhuman—is precisely what needs theorizing. Among other limitations, a focus on phobia risks overlooking phobias masked as philias. Page 445 →For alternative reactions to the concept of ecophobia see Tom J. Hillard, “’Deep Into That Darkness Peering’”; S. K. Robisch, “The Woodshed.” In “Beyond Ecophobia” David Sobel proposes a different use of the term. For more on the importance of embracing ambiguity see Paul Wapner, Living Through the End of Nature. Wapner acknowledges that “most of us hate ambiguity…[which] seems to undermine us…seems to make us vulnerable to being swayed off our path.” But he rightly proposes that “[even though] the last thing environmentalism seems to need these days is ambivalence…ambiguity may be the movement's saving grace” (25). This is because it forces us to acknowledge the contradictions of our relationships with both other people and the nonhuman. 38. In The Monster Within, Barbara Almond argues that ambivalence—a “conflicted mental state” in which one person harbors both loving and hating feelings for another individual—characterizes all human relationships (8). The same might be said of most relationships between people and environments. 39. Of course, understandings of what constitutes “positive,” “negative,” “uncertain,” and “indifferent”—on the part of both the interacting individual/group and the interpreter(s) of these interactions—also are quite flexible. Some of these uncertainties likely stem from the ambivalent position of people vis-à-vis nature, often congruent with the ambivalent positioning highlighted in the work of Homi Bhabha: “The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry—a difference that is almost nothing but not quite—to menace—a difference that is almost total but not quite.” Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 131. 40. Peter C. Rollins cites American attitudes toward industrial development as a key example of this ecological ambivalence, noting that “the feature film Tulsa reflects a national mind divided between enthusiastic approval of economic development and deep-seated anxieties about despoiling a Virgin Land. This abiding ambivalence has been part of our heritage since the Romantic era when America constructed

an identity that proclaimed us to be Nature's Nation.” Peter C. Rollins, “Tulsa (1949) as an Oil-Field Film,” 81. Cf. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film. For a succinct discussion of the relationship among ambivalence, attitudes, and behaviors, see Stephen C. Craig and Michael D. Martinez, eds., Ambivalence and the Structure of Political Opinion. 41. American treatment of animals is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Forty-six million American households own at least one dog and 38 million at least one cat; Americans spend approximately $40 billion annually on their pets, sometimes even leaving them generous trust funds. In the same period they also consume the meat of close to 35 million steers. See Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals; Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution; Jeffrey Toobin, “Rich Bitch.” 42. Lawrence Buell identifies this ambiguity as a phenomenon of advanced industrial societies: “The gap between environmental attitudes and behavior specifically is largely explicable by the alienation of modern daily living from the processes of extraction and production, as well as by a lack of felt urgency among even the moderately well-off, not to mention the truly affluent.” Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 231. See also Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Page 446 →Criticism, 244 n. 16. But in fact there have always been gaps between environmental attitudes and behaviors. 43. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 55, 64. Rachel Carson (1907–64) is also known for her best-sellers The Sea around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955), and Under the Sea Wind (1941). 44. Alan Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace, 387–88. 45. Likewise, some of the same professionals (scientists, engineers) complicit in environmental degradation represent some of the greatest hopes for environmental remediation. See Leo Marx, “Environmental Degradation and the Ambiguous Social Role of Science and Technology.” Stephen DeStefano addresses the contradictory consequences of urban sprawl on different animal species in Coyote at the Kitchen Door. 46. See Jacques Leslie, Deep Water. 47. In 2010, for instance, Toyota sold more than 315,000 Prius hybrids in Japan, toppling the Japanese sales record for a single model, held by Corolla since 1990. “Corolla's 1990 Sales.” In early September 2011 Toyota officials announced plans to begin making the Prius in China. The same weekend, Chinese leaders called for Chinese automakers to make fewer, and more fuel efficient automobiles. See Keith Bradsher, “China Aims to Rein in Car Sales”; “Toyota to Make New Prius in China.” 48. Gordon Hempton compares quiet-spaces extinction to species extinction; he argues that there is likely no place on earth—including the Amazon rain forest—that has not been touched by the sounds of people and their cultural products. Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence, 13. 49. “Toyota Device Alerts Pedestrians to Approaching Quiet Hybrid.” See also “Shizuka na HV.” For more on other automakers working on “car tones” for hybrids, see Jim Motavalli, “Hybrid Cars May Include Fake Vroom for Safety.” Another form of environmentally friendly hazard is the LED traffic signal, whose low heat emissions allow “snow and ice to accumulate more easily in certain conditions.” These lights have caused several traffic fatalities. Susan Saulny, “An Environmentally Friendly Traffic Signal,” A11. Wind farms also are not without their drawbacks. They provide cleaner energy, but those who live near them have reported health problems including insomnia, tinnitus, and tremors. See “Government to Study Effects.” Trash too is an “inherently contradictory material.” Vivian E. Thomson, Garbage In. And global warming remains highly contested, some arguing that its consequences are not particularly to be feared. Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It. Just as disturbing is that the rare earths used to make some of the world's greenest technology come from some of China's most environmentally damaging mines. See Keith Bradsher, “EarthFriendly Elements,” A1, B5. And devices that decrease dependence on paper, and thus on deforestation, harm the earth in other, more significant ways; the environmental cost of a single e-reader, for instance, is about the same as that of fifty books. Ted Genoways, “The Price of the Paperless Revolution.” Similarly, although on a smaller scale, despite their “green” reputation, Amish farming practices have been damaging local ecosystems for decades. Sindya N. Bhanoo, “Amish Farming.” On the other hand, some changes to bodyscapes once assumed detrimental have proven otherwise. An excellent example is power line transmission corridors. These were long Page 447 →imagined to signal environmental degradation. But recently they have gained a new reputation as “critical homes for faltering species of birds, bees, butterflies, plants, and a host of other species.” See Beth Daley, “Green Lines.” At the same time, they have been shown to cause cancer in humans. 50. David Harvey, “What's Green,” 331–32, 351. Ana Isla and others have argued that “environmental

conservation led by neoliberal governments and large NGOs in the global North has become yet another instrument for the colonization of Third World Resources—in particular, women's work, and nature.” See Ana Isla, “Who Pays for the Kyoto Protocol?” See also Patrick Hayden, Cosmopolitan Global Politics, 121–51; Stephan Schmidheiny, ed., Changing Course. On the other hand, as Félix Guattari argues in Les trois ecologies (The Three Ecologies, 1989), technology is necessary for the planet's survival, and our best option is to “engage in an ongoing process of transformation.” Verena Andermatt Conley, “Urban Ecological Practices,” 139. 51. Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything, 192–98. Heinberg notes, “The recent fossil fuel era has seen so much growth of population and consumption that there is an overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions. This should be glaringly obvious to everyone…But language also keeps us most of us in the dark. This is partly because magical thinking is alive and well…We live today in a fog of words so thick that it largely prevents us from seeing where we are or where we're headed” (193–94). 52. Timothy Hildebrandt argues in “Ambiguous Information” that “global environmental cooperation is actually contingent upon ambiguous knowledge…When knowledge of causation is limited and information emphasizes the universal effects of environmental problems, the relative cost of cooperation is low and the likelihood of agreement high.” In Living through the End of Nature, Paul Kevin Wapner argues that ambivalence can be a source of wisdom and political strength: “Ambiguity seems anathema to clear thinking and determination…[but it] can actually provide insight and the kind of perspicuity longed for in these difficult times. It can, in fact, supply confidence and direction. It can do so to the degree that it stretches environmentalists across the tensions that inflict environmental decisions in ways that demand integrity” (26, 202–3). 53. This flexibility includes advocating phenomena once believed anathema, including nuclear power. Stewart Brand argues in Whole Earth Discipline, “Environmentalists have much less to fear in reality from the current nuclear power industry than they think, and much more to gain from new and planned reactor designs than they realize…Nukes are Green; new nukes even more so…The loom of climate change has altered everybody's perspective on costs and risks” (76, 100). Brand also discusses the damage caused by opposition to genetic engineering: “In defense of a bizarre idea of what is ‘natural,’ we reject the very thing Rachel Carson encouraged us to pursue—the new science of biotic controls” (117). Brand's comments predate Japan's March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, discussed in Chapter 1. 54. Most notable in this context are paintings of people hunting animals. The paintings that have been discovered “testify to a much longer track [of painting] behind them,” extending back perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Paul G. Bahn, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art, 283; Brian Boyd, On Page 448 →the Origin of Stories, 76. For a synopsis of human representations of animals see Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, 1–26. 55. This definition of world literature is from David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 4. The Epic of Gilgamesh has conventionally been interpreted as “a mixture of pure adventure, of morality, and of tragedy.” N. K. Sandars, “Introduction,” 7. But, as Louise Westling has argued, “Ecological tragedy is…the very ground of Gilgamesh's heroism.” Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World, 21. Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “The first antagonist of Gilgamesh is the forest…Gilgamesh peers over the walls [of the Sumerian city of Uruk] and sees human bodies floating down the river in funeral processions…In revolt against the scene of finitude, Gilgamesh has a vision: he will go to the forests, cut down the trees…Logs will become the cadavers. The hero who dies within the city will project his own personal fate onto the forests…If he is not wide enough to ‘cover the earth,’ yet may he still uncover it.” Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests, 14–18. This exploit reflects historical conditions. As Harrison comments, “We know from the written records that certain Sumerian individuals actually achieved considerable fame by undertaking expeditions to the cedar forests and seizing huge quantities of timber.” Timber was a precious commodity in the wake of rampant deforestation (17). See also Sharif S. Elmusa, “The Ax of Gilgamesh”; John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth, 19. Interesting in this context are the South African writer Douglas Livingstone's (1932–1996) poems “The Hero—Enkidu” (1968) and “The Hero—Gilgamesh” (1968). The latter speaks of the monster Kumbaba (Humbaba) as guarding “something / or the other with parochial jealousy: we think, some pieces of trash” (368), implying that the cedar forest already has been laid waste. Cf. Yusef Komunyakaa's (1947-) Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006). David Damrosch describes the loss and rediscovery of this epic in The Buried Book. The Bible is another example of an early work of world

literature replete with references to environmental degradation, beginning with the advent of agriculture. Steven Stoll, “Agrarian Anxieties.” See Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are, for a synopsis of classical and early European ecofiction (9–12). 56. In A Sand County Almanac (1949), a text celebrated for establishing biocentrism, the American ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) defines “land health” as “the capacity of the land for self-renewal” (221). But the capacity for self-renewal is not the only measure of health, nor is it necessarily an indicator of health. See also Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health.” J. R. McNeill summarizes several of the difficulties of evaluating change in Something New under the Sun, xxv-xxvi. 57. Many of the transformations the built environment inflicts on the nonhuman can be interpreted as damage. 58. The term “ecocosmopolitan” is from Ursula Heise. My use of the term is similar, but focuses less on human perceptions of ties to and identification with the natural world on multiple scales than on engaging with ecodegradation beyond a single time or place. Heise argues: “Eco-cosmopolitanism…is an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds…Ecocriticism has only begun to explore the cultural means by which ties to the natural world are produced and perpetuated, Page 449 →and how the perception of such ties fosters or impedes regional, national, and transnational forms of identification…The point of an eco-cosmopolitan critical project…would be…to investigate by what means individuals and groups in specific cultural contexts have succeeded in envisioning themselves in similarly concrete fashion as part of the global biosphere, or by what means they might be enabled to do so.” Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 61–62. Patrick Hayden's similar notion of “world environment citizenship” is also more focused on people than my own: “World environmental citizenship can be viewed as a component of the more general cosmopolitan conception of world citizenship…World environmental citizenship arises from an ethical concern for the social, political and economic problems associated with the environment and humanity's dependence upon it, and from a recognition of our global responsibilities for the human condition in light of humanity's interconnectedness with the environment. Thus the world environmental citizen is concerned about the common good of the human community and places particular emphasis on the fact that we are all citizens belonging to both local environments and a single global environment.” Patrick Hayden, Cosmopolitan Global Politics, 147. Hayden's ecocosmopolitanism is similar to engaged ecocosmopolitanism, by which I mean believing and ideally acting on the belief that people have obligations not just to people beyond their own communities but also to other species, regardless of their habitats. Cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah, who in Cosmopolitanism declares “cosmopolitanism” is best understood as composed of two intertwining threads: “One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance…There's a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge” (xv). In A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold posits an early form of engaged ecocosmopolitanism: “Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land” (209). Engaged ecocosmopolitanism can include the belief, expressed in the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío's (1867–1916) poem “Coloquio de los centauros” (Colloquy of the Centaurs, 1896), that “Each leaf of each tree sings its own song/and each drop in the ocean has its own soul.” In other words, that all parts of the nonhuman matter. 59. This is particularly true of Japanese literature, where the place consciousness of discourse on the wonders of the natural world is especially strong. 60. Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 227. 61. Critical judgments of this form of environmental possibility can be based on the creative writer's knowledge, or at least on what is known of the writer's knowledge of environmental problems. 62. By this I mean that creative works, even literature with a bioregionalist focus, rarely specify the precise spatial and temporal range of the environmental degradation they describe. See, for instance, Tom Lynch, Xerophilia. “Bioregionalism” holds that the future of the planet depends on concern for ecological as

opposed to jurisdictional units. Page 450 → 63. In addition, celebrations of nature, even those published by societies experiencing severe environmental degradation, are not necessarily products of ignorance or of active desire to conceal damaged ecosystems; they instead at times are protests against changes occurring in the experienced world. As the historian Mark Elvin questions: “Do our sources mainly reflect the dominant tendencies of an age, or are they more often reactions, by far-seeing and sensitive thinkers, against these dominant tendencies? And, if a mixture, where, and in what proportions?” Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 324. 64. As Axel Goodbody comments in Nature, Technology and Cultural Change, literature and other cultural media can serve “as a site where the consequences of prevailing and alternative value systems and conceptions of nature can be staged and explored in fictional scenarios” (278). 65. This is part of what gives teachers of literature the opportunity to raise the environmental consciousness of society. Cheryll Glotfelty has gone so far as to argue that “as Literature professors, we may even have more of an impact in raising the environmental consciousness level of society than if we taught, say, Conservation Biology or Wildlife Management, for students in those courses are already ecologically inclined.” Cheryll Glotfelty, “The Strong Green Thread,” 3. 66. Zhang Longxi and others have conflated thematic networks with those of world literature, but in many cases it is more productive to distinguish between them. See Zhang Longxi, “What is Literature?” 70–71. On the other hand, intercultural thematic networks, like their conceptual counterparts, can overlap, shape, and be significantly shaped by networks of circulation, reading, and trans-culturation, those networks generally understood to be the hallmarks of world literature. 67. Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both, 25–26. Wai Chee Di-mock similarly speaks of “categories of experience…that seem not entirely predicated on the temporal and spatial boundaries of the nation-state.” She asks, “What would literary history look like if the field were divided, not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literatures?” and proposes that the concept of genre can provide a new heuristic map: “Likeness here is probabilistic and distributional; it has less to do with common ancestry than with a convergence of attributes, issuing from environments roughly similar but widely dispersed. What matters here is not lineage, but a phenomenal field of contextually induced parallels. Born of the local circumstances that shape them and echoing other forms shaped by circumstances more or less alike, they make up a decentralized web.” Dimock's observations concerning “affinities” are true for multiple phenomena. Wai Chee Dimock, Through other Continents, 5, 74. In The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry Stephen Owen likewise stresses affinities, focusing on those that transcend genre: “What this poetry [of various genres and authors] shares are themes, topics, sequences of exposition, templates, and a range of verbal habits” (9). 68. Examining literature on oil, for instance, allows us to uncover relationships among texts by writers as diverse as the American authors Edna Ferber (1885–1968), Linda Hogan (1947-), Joe Kane (1899–2002), and Upton Sinclair (1878–1968); the Nigerians Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–1995), John Pepper Clark (1935-), and Tayo Olafioye; and the Jordanian-born Arabic novelist Abdelrahman Page 451 →Munif (1933–2004). See also www.poetsforlivingwaters.org. For additional examples of intercultural thematic networks involving specific environmental issues see Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 245–46. 69. At its broadest, ecocriticism is “the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relationships in any literary text, even texts that seem (at first glance) oblivious of the nonhuman world.” Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think, 27. See also Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 138. Ecocriticism is a diverse, interdisciplinary field, an eclectic and pluriform initiative not bound to any single method of inquiry or to any one environmentalist doctrine or commitment. William Rueckert coined the term in “Literature and Ecology” (1978). The field's foundational texts include Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964); Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival (1972); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973); John Elder, Imagining the Earth (1985). Marx and Williams highlighted the important role literature plays in understanding the environmental transformations of modernity and urbanization. In so doing they were partly responsible for ecocriticism's early focus on pastoral imagination, and on Anglo-American romanticism (late 1700s—mid-1800s) in particular, especially the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Anglo-American successors such as Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). Examples of this phenomenon include Peter A.

Fritzell, Nature Writing and America (1990); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (1991); Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism (1994); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (1995); Terry Gifford, Green Voices (1995); Terry Gifford, Pastoral (1999); James C. McKusick, Green Writing (2000); Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (2002). 70. The conferences and publications of ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature & Environment, est. 1992), the United States's “premier membership organization in the field of literature and environment,” overwhelmingly feature discussion of Western and especially Anglophone literatures. http://www.asle.org /site/about/. East Asian scholars have a long legacy of writing about East Asian creative portrayals of nature. But, with several notable exceptions, scrutinizing the ecological implications of East Asian creative texts and their treatment of environmental degradation in particular is a relatively recent phenomenon. For instance, the 2007 ASLE Japan-Korea Joint Symposium, subtitled “Place, Nature, Language: Thinking about the ‘Now’ in Japanese and Korean Environmental Literature” (ASLE Nikkan gd shinpojiumu: basho, shizen, kotoba: Nikkan kanky bungaku no ‘ima’ o kangaeru,” Kanazawa, Japan) focused on East Asian literatures, with many papers looking at the ecological implications of East Asian creative works. For more on East Asian ecocritical scholarship and organizations see chapter I. Maureen Devine and Christa GreweVolpp sketch the field of ecocriticism in Europe in “Introduction,” I. In India, ecocritical scholarship is likewise growing, most notably in languages other than English. See Rjendra arm Akshara, Vrka mitra; Kamala Nryana rya, Vaidika vnmaya meparyvarana aura pradaa; Bholntha, Yaha paryvaraa hamr hai; R dh Cauhna, Janarala bakar; Aparn Gupt, Rmacaritamnasa me paryvarana-cintana; Vandan Rastog, Prcna bhrata meparyvarana-cintana; Page 452 →Nañjal Rthaura, Purna-shitya meparyvarana-sarakana; Pravesh Saxena, Vedom meparyavarana-samraksana. See also Rayson K. Alex, “OSLE-India Update”; Mahesh Rangarajan, “Five Nature Writers.” 71. See Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World”; Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease; Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Caribbean Literature and the Environment and Routes and Roots; Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism”; Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism; Andrew Husband, “Post-colonial ‘Greenery’”; Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments; Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence”; Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, eds., Postcolonial Green; Helen Tiffin, ed., Five Emus to the King of Siam; Anthony Vital, “Toward an African Ecocriticism”; Laurenz Volkmann et al., eds., Local Natures, Global Responsibilities. 72. This issue was discussed at length at the February 2010 Officers’ Retreat of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. ASLE has announced that it is committed to encouraging and participating in the internationalization of the field. “ASLE Officers’ Retreat Summary.” See also Ursula Heise, “Species, Space, and the Imagination of the Global.” Similarly, in Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies, Patrick Murphy calls for the development of “transnational ecocritical theory, ” by which he means “a theory that would transect, that is, cut across, the limitations of national perspectives and boundaries…Avoiding parochialism does not mean practicing universalism, but it also does not mean abandoning the idea that ecocriticism in whatever varied forms it may take is a crucial, relevant, and necessary literary and cultural practice to be promoted worldwide” (63). Annie Merrill Ingram et al. call for more scholarly attention to the ecological implications of Asian and Asian American literatures. See their “Introduction: Thinking of Our Life in Nature.” The relative paucity of translations is a major hurdle. As Jim Dwyer admits frankly in Where the Wild Books Are, a guide to ecofiction: “In some locales, such as eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and the Arab world, it is difficult [for me] to know whether the paucity of work that I have identified is primarily due to a lack of material or to my own relative ignorance of their languages, literatures, and cultures. There are dozens of excellent green authors from Africa, Asia, and South America whose work has been only partially translated or has not been translated into English at all” (79). One major exception is the Chinese writer Jiang Rong (pen name of Lu Jiamin; 1946-), whose celebrated novel Lang tuteng (Wolf Totem, 2004) was translated into English in 2008; this novel has been discussed in publications by ecocritics without a background in Chinese studies. Translations of course are only a stepping stone, and ideally in the years to come scholars of non-Western literatures will publish more work with an ecological focus and more ecocritics with a background in

Anglo-American literatures will take up study of non-Western languages. 73. See Martine Batchelor and Kerry Brown, eds., Buddhism and Ecology; N. J. Girardot et al., eds., Daoism and Ecology; Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryken Williams, eds., Buddhism and Ecology; Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong, eds., Confucianism and Ecology. See also Christopher Key Chapple, ed., Jainism and Ecology; Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds., Hinduism and Ecology; Richard C. Foltz et al., eds., Islam and Ecology; Page 453 →John A. Grim, ed., Indigenous Traditions and Ecology; Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds., Christianity and Ecology; Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Judaism and Ecology. 74. The interest of the American naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau in East and South Asian thought is well known. For a précis, see J. Gerard Dollar, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of China,” 412–13. See Jincai Yang, “Chinese Projections of Thoreau” for a summary of Chinese engagement with Thoreau. Resonances of classical Asian poetry and philosophy echo in the writing of the American Beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982), Gary Snyder (1930-), and Philip Whalen (1923–2002). On the other hand, as Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith have pointed out, East Asian modes of thought have not themselves “been concerned with understanding and preserving nature as a healthy ecosystem, nor even as a self-perpetuating source of sustenance. They have, instead been used to define humanness, morality, aesthetic appreciation and to explain noumenal and metaphysical phenomena.” Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese Perceptions of Nature: Ideals and Illusions,” 29. For varying uses of the term “environmentality” see Arun Agrawal, Environmentality, 8, 20–24, 233 n. 15, and “Environmentality,” 166; Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 11, 24–25, 131–32, and “Literature as Environmental(ist) Thought Experiment,” 24; Ashley Dawson, “Another Country”; Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests. 75. Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perspectives of and Behavior toward the Natural Environment,” 36. See also Peter C. Perdue's comments in Richard C. Hoffmann et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1437. 76. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 321, 323. 77. Heiner Roetz, Mensch und Natur im alten China, 85. Cited by Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 324. For more on disjunctions between beliefs and behaviors see Rhoads Murphey, “Man and Nature in China”; Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behavior.” 78. On the other hand, the shape of this degradation is likely to change, as population sizes and distributions shift and lifestyles alter. 79. Garbage trucks deliver trash to basement incinerators, where it is burned; scrubbed emissions are released via tall smokestacks. The structures at the Itabashi Botanical Gardens in Tokyo are powered by energy from a local garbage incinerator. Another of Tokyo's many incinerators is located across the street from Kinuta Park but has no discernable effect on the park's air quality. Kinuta Park is one of the largest green spaces in Tokyo; its paths and sports facilities make it a popular place for runners, walkers, cyclists, and other athletes. 80. Comments made by Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council in Brussels. Cited in Keith Bradsher, “Green Power Takes Root in China,” B1, B5. 81. Andrew Higgins, “China Tries Eco-friendly Alternative.” 82. “London Bids to be Greenest City,” 10. 83. The term “shadow ecology” refers to “the aggregate environmental impact on resources outside [a nation's] territory of government practices, especially official development assistance (ODA); corporate conduct, investment and technology Page 454 →transfers; and trade, including consumption, export and consumer prices, and import tariffs.” Peter Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest, 2–3. Jim MacNeill et al. define the ecological shadow of a country as “the environmental resources it draws from other countries and the global commons.” Jim MacNeill et al., Beyond Interdependence, 58–59. MacNeill et al. give Japan as an example of a nation with a substantial shadow ecology (59–61). 84. Richard H. Solomon, “Foreword,” x. Complicating matters is the fact that much of Japan's sulfur emission comes from the Sakurajima volcano in Kyushu. Reinhard Drifte, “Transboundary Pollution,” 78. 85. Derek Hall, “Japan's Ecological Shadow in Asia,” 85–86.

86. Wentao Wang et al., “Atmospheric Particulate Matter Pollution during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.” 87. This wave of ecocriticism drew in part from deep ecology, including Arne Naess's “The Shallow and the Deep.” Timothy Morton discusses problems with nature writing in Ecology without Nature. See also Glenn Adelson et al., eds., Environment, 676–705. 88. First-wave ecocriticism was concerned with place-attachment at a local or regional scale, seen in writings by Wendell Berry (1934–), including The Unsettling of America (1977) and Standing by Words (1983), and Gary Snyder, including The Practice of the Wild (1990) and A Place in Space (1995). Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment.” In The Future of Environmental Criticism Lawrence Buell distinguishes between “first-wave” and “secondwave” ecocriticism but cautions that there remains significant overlap between the two. Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, and Karen Thornber outline some of these continuities in “Literature and Environment,” including ecocriticism's sustained interest in all expressive media, everything from printed texts to visual, musical, and cinematic performance, as well as legislative documents and NGO reports. Other ongoing interests include environmental rhetoric studies; enlisting scientific models, particularly from evolutionary biology, ecology, and information sciences; differences of environmental perception based on gender and heritage, including indigeneity; and literary imagination of relations between people and animals. Major ecocritical scholarship from the 1990s also includes Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., Ecocriticism Reader (1996); Verena Conley, Ecopolitics (1997); Patrick D. Murphy, ed., The Literature of Nature (1998); Michael Bennett and David Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities (1999); Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999). Ecocritical scholarship from the 2000s includes Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (2000); Laurence Coupe, ed., The Green Studies Reader (2000); Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World (2001); Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writing; Joni Adamson et al., eds., The Environmental Justice Reader (2002); Terrell F. Dixon, City Wilds (2002); Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life (2003); Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, eds., The ISLE Reader (2003); Glen Love, Practical Ecocriticism (2003); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (2004); Noda Ken’ichi and Yki Masami, eds., Kanky bungakuron josetsu (2004); Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005); Elizabeth DeLoughrey et Page 455 →al., eds., Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005); Jennifer French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish-American Regional Writers (2005); Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature (2005); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots (2007); George Handley, New World Poetics (2007); Robert Marzec, An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature (2007); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (2007); Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008); Brian Moore, Ecology and Literature (2008); Paul Outka, Race and Nature (2008); Dorceta E. Taylor, The Environment and the People (2009); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures (2010); Lawrence Buell, “Nature and City” (2010); Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010); Upamanyu Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments (2010); Frank Stewart and Anjoli Roy, Wild Hearts (2010); Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction (2011); Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011); Simon T. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare (2011). For synopses of the field see Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment”; Ursula Heise, “The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism”; Loretta Johnson, “Greening the Library.” 89. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 130; Ursula Heise, “Bloomington 2011.” 90. Lawrence Buell, “Literature as Environmental(ist) Thought Experiment,” 24–25. 91. Drawing boundaries among writers and literatures is often problematic. Writers publish in lands in which they were not born or raised or with which they do not identify most closely, in forms and styles not habitual to the languages used, and in languages that are not their ostensible “mother tongues” or do not “match” their cultures. And although “Japanese literature” is now often understood to be literature written in Japanese, regardless of a writer's personal identity, the terms “Chinese literature” and “Korean literature” frequently refer to texts written by people of Chinese and Korean descent, respectively, no matter the language. But for clarity, and to highlight the interplays among what conventionally have been discussed as the relatively separate spheres of modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures, in this book

the modifiers Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese preceding such terms as “literature,” “literary work,” or “creative text” refer to the writer's primary identity, regardless of the language or place of publication of his/her text. Exceptions and ambiguities are discussed on a case-by-case basis. Nationality, culture, and national and cultural identities can be notoriously arbitrary and are often multiple, particularly in cases of individuals who have spent substantial time in and identify with multiple places, who are born to parents with different cultural identities, or have not spent much if any time in their ostensible “homelands.” Moreover, the constructed and often manipulated categories “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “Korean,” and “Taiwanese,” not to mention “Western”—whether they refer to individuals, societies, languages, or literatures—are far from discrete homogenous entities; these designations obscure major differences within and highlight those between nationalities. But separation along national lines also obscures distinctive transcultural interfaces and contact spaces. Both knowledge of foreign languages and Page 456 →the many divisions within Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures help to promote links with likeminded writers from elsewhere, both within and outside East Asia. 92. Silvia Spitta, Between Two Waters, 24. For additional uses of the term see Anuradha Dingwaney, “Introduction,” 8; Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubana del tabaco y el azúcar, xi; Phyllis Peres, Transculturation and Resistance in Lusophone African Narrative, 10; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7; Ángel Rama, Transculturación Narrativa en América Latina. 93. The present use of “contact space” (or “nebula”) differs slightly from its articulations in my Empire of Texts in Motion. There I introduced the concept of “artistic contact nebula” to designate the “physical and creative spaces where dancers, dramatists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers and other artists from cultures/nations in unequal power relationships grapple with and transculturate one another's output” (2) and the concept of “literary contact nebulae” to designate “active sites of readerly contact [reading creative texts from cultures/nations in asymmetrical power relationships with one's own], writerly contact [interactions among creative writers from conflicting societies], and textual contact [transculturating creative texts in this environment], intertwined modes of transculturation that depend to some degree on linguistic contact [engaging with the language of the society oppressing or oppressed by one's own] and often involve travel” (2). Here I use the terms “contact space” and “contact nebula” to refer to physical and creative spaces of interactions among peoples and cultural products in a broader range of power relations. 94. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 4, 281, 300. See also Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet.” The transculturations (e.g., adaptations, translations, intertextualizations) of creative texts that are circulated and read beyond their “original culture” should also be seen as part of world literature. In addition, the concept of “original culture” is somewhat problematic, since many works of literature, or at least their component parts, have “origins” in multiple spaces. Not surprisingly, understandings of what constitutes “world literature” vary both within and across cultures. 95. Examining how portrayals of environmental degradation have been actively transculturated over time and across spaces opens new possibilities in scholarly discourse on world literature, including the development of a subfield on world literature and environment. 96. Suman Gupta, Globalization and Literature, 145. For a recent discussion of disease and the future of the humanities see Gregory Tomso, “The Humanities and HIV/AIDS: Where Do We Go from Here?” See also Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. 97. Proliferating worldwide crises impose an obligation on studies of literature not simply to expand their thematic scope but also to develop a keener planetary consciousness. Cary Wolfe's vision for animal studies is applicable to ecocriticism more generally: “animal studies, if it is to be something other than a mere thematic, fundamentally challenges the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings sustained and reproduced in the current disciplinary protocols of cultural studies (not to mention literature studies)…The full force of animal studies, then, resides in its power to remind us that it is Page 457 →not enough to reread and reinterpret…the relation of metaphor and species difference, the crosspollination of speciesist, sexist, and racist discursive structures in literature…as long as [rereading and reinterpreting] leaves unquestioned the humanist schema of the knowing subject who undertakes such a reading, then it sustains the very humanism and anthropocentrism that animal studies sets out to question.” Cary Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human,” 568–69. 98. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 30–31, 37. In Against War Nelson Maldonado Torres notes the precedents in earlier centuries for the European planetary consciousness described by Pratt (210).

99. Rafal Serafin, “Noosphere, Gaia and the Science of the Biosphere,” 137. The noosphere is literally “mind sphere” (nous sphaira; υοσ σφαρα). Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945); Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). 100. Likewise, although conceptions of the planet as noosphere (technocentric, ecologically anthropocentric, with people in charge) often are contrasted with those of the planet as Gaia (ecocentric, ecologically egalitarian, with people at the periphery), the two viewpoints in fact overlap in intriguing ways: “In the conceptions of both Gaia and the noosphere, the biosphere represents human understanding of the biogeochemical cycles taking place on our planet. Thus, the contradictions of technocentrism and ecocentrism become irrelevant with the asking of common analytical questions about the functioning of the biosphere…proponents of Gaia might concede that some portions of the biosphere and biogeochemical processes…are within the partial control of humankind, while others…may well become subject to human regulation in the near future. On the other hand, modern proponents of the noosphere might concede that some portions of the biosphere and biogeochemical processes…will remain forever beyond the reach of human science and technology.” Rafal Serafin, “Noosphere, Gaia and the Science of the Biosphere,” 138. See also Margaret McGurn, Global Spirituality, Planetary Consciousness. 101. Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against War, 210. 102. Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet and America, Set and Subset,” 5, 10–11. For cautions against the selfaggrandizing such approaches can foster see Djelal Kadir, “Comparative Literature in an Age of Terrorism,” 74–75, and “To World, To Globalize.” 103. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72–73. Spivak and Paul Gilroy both explain their preference for a “planetary” as opposed to “global” focus. See Paul Gilroy, After Empire, xii; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72–73, 93. Vandana Shiva discusses differences between the “global” and “planetary consciousness” in “The Greening of the Global Reach,” 53–66. See also Alex Steffen, “Editor's Introduction.” 104. Paul Gilroy, After Empire, 4, 84. Gilroy draws from a variety of cultural forms, including creative texts. See 13, 18–19, 162. 105. Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet and America, Set and Subset,” 6. Research on comparative slavery dates farther back than Dimock's reference to Philip Curtin's The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (1990) suggests. Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969) published Slave and Citizen in 1946. But Dimock's larger argument holds true. 106. Dimock in Through Other Continents, Gilroy in After Empire, and Spivak Page 458 →in Death of a Discipline acknowledge the importance of the nonhuman, but reconceptualizing relationships among people and environments is only marginally addressed in these works. Cf. Spivak's translations of the writings of Bengali environmental and social activist Mahasweta Devi (1926–) in Imaginary Maps and Chotti Munda & His Arrow, which are concerned with problems of environmental justice. Also noteworthy are efforts to combine world and environmental history. See Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History; Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite, 1–3. 107. It is probable that planetary consciousness will need to be replaced by universal consciousness, as more becomes known about the impacts of human behaviors on spaces beyond the planet earth. Much literature already exhibits this consciousness, including poems by the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao (1923– 2008) such as “Sengen” (Declaration, 1986) and “21 seiki ni wa” (In the Twenty-First Century, 1996), discussed in Chapter 3, and Hoshi Shin’ichi's short story “Ijiwaru na hoshi” (Spiteful Planet, 1972), also discussed in Chapter 3. Cf. Sakaki Nanao, “Hoshi o tabey yo” (Let's Eat Stars, 1988), discussed in Chapter 2. 108. See Joni Adamson et al., eds., The Environmental Justice Reader; Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures, Undomesticated Ground; Andrea Campbell, ed., New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism; Krista Comer, Landscapes of the New West; Ian Frederick Finseth, Shades of Green; Greta Gaard, “New Directions for Ecofeminism”; Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Ecofeminist Literary Criticism; Jack M. Hollander, The Real Environmental Crisis; Marti Kheel, Nature Ethics; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature and Earthcare; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies; Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories; Judith Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Ariel Salley, ed., Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice; Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist; Scott Slovic et al., eds., Ekotopia to kankyseigi no bungaku; Rachel Stein, ed., New Perspectives on Environmental Justice; Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures; Michael Ziser and Julie Sze,

“Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics.” 109. Transborder phenomena here are understood as both transculturated phenomena (those that actually cross borders) and phenomena that exist in multiple spaces but which have more local roots in each of these spaces. 110. Much has been written on “place,” “space,” and distinguishing between the two. See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 252–79, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 62–96, and Writing for an Endangered World, 55–83; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117; David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; William L. Howarth, “Imagined Territory”; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 31–33; Saskia Sassen, ed., Deciphering the Global; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State; Neil Smith, Uneven Development. See also Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place. Modern constructions of space, particularly the imperial and the global, often are thought to struggle against deeply rooted ideas of place, including the local and colonized, but in many cases the space/place dichotomy is a distinction without a difference. For more on this phenomenon see Thomas R. H. Havens, Parkscapes, 4. 111. A Cheng is the pen name of Zhong Acheng (1949–); Tian Yage is the Page 459 →Chinese name of the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima (1960–). Ishimure Michiko was born in 1927 and Huang Chunming in 1939. 112. The dates for these writers are Chng Hynjong (1939–), Kim Kwanggyu (1941–), Ko n (1933–), Rongzi (1928–), Xin Yu (1933–), and Wang Ping (1957–). Rongzi is the pen name of Wang Rongzhi. 113. The dates for these writers are Ch’oe Sngho (1954–), Liu Kexiang (1957–), Hwang Sunwn (1915–2000), Masuda Mizuko (1948–), Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), Jia Fuxiang (pen name Zhuang Jia, 1931–), and Gao Xingjian (1940–). 114. The dates for these writers are Tanikawa Shuntar (1931–), Yi Hynggi (1933–), Chen Jingrong (1917–1989), Han Shaogong (1953–), Tsutsui Yasutaka (1934–), and Cho Sehi (1942–). 115. The dates for these writers are Isakawa Masaomi (1930–), Ch’oe Sngja (1952–), Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1977), Bai Xianyong (1937–), and Wang Lixiong (1953–). 116. The dates for these writers are Oguma Hideo (1901–1940), Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), Murakami Haruki (1949–), and Abé Kb (1924–1993). 117. Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 226.

Chapter 1 1. Thank you to Steve Owen for the reference and the translation, adapted from H. G. Lamont, “An Early Ninth Century Debate on Heaven,” 67. Liu Zongyuan (733–819) here is transcribing a conversation with Han Yu (768–824), another celebrated Tang (618–906) poet and prose writer. 2. For more on East Asian religions and environmental ethics in general see King-Tak Ip, Environmental Ethics. 3. Cf. Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are, 95–97. 4. East Asia's principal transboundary ecological problems include air pollution, acid rain, and the “yellow dust” phenomenon in Japan and Korea, brought about by Chinese industrial and power-plant emissions and desertification (the latter caused by deforestation, overgrazing, and industrialization); marine pollution caused by oil spills, sewage, and industrial and radioactive waste originating in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; depleted fisheries throughout the region by fishers from all four East Asian sites; and nuclear waste disposal as nuclear power production increases throughout the region. For more on these concerns as well as the dynamics of cooperative environmental management in East Asia, see Shin-wha Lee, “Environmental Regime-Building in Northeast Asia.” See also Miranda A. Schreurs and Dennis Pirages, eds., Ecological Security in Northeast Asia. Paruedee Nguitragool's Environmental Cooperation in Southeast Asia provides an important comparative perspective. 5. For more on this phenomenon, see Karen Thornber, “Legitimacy and Community.” 6. On the other hand, as noted below many of these writers have spent significant time abroad, and questions of identity appear prominently in their oeuvre. Page 460 → 7. In other words, fish, turtles, and wood will remain plentiful. Mencius (372–289 B.C.E.) expresses similar

sentiments in the parable of Ox Mountain. This mountain once was covered with vegetation, which attracted herders, wood-cutters, and others who transported its resources to disparate sites. Not given time to recover, the mountain gradually grew barren. This parable, based on actual events, emphasizes that people, like vegetation, need time to rejuvenate, but this story also has environmental resonances. As explained later in this chapter, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369–286 B.C.E.), Mencius's contemporary, also exhibits nascent environmental consciousness. Even earlier examples of calls for sustainability include those by Guan Zhong (725–645 B.C.E.), prime minister of the Qi State (?–645 B.C.E.) in the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 B.C.E.) of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, who cautioned people “not to raise too many cattle on the grassland, lest it fail to recover from over exploitation; and not to plant crops too close together, otherwise the fertility of the soil would be insufficient.” Yushi Mao, “Evolution of Environmental Ethics,” 43. 8. In its December 11, 1987 report to the United Nations, the World Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” recommending that this should be the “central guiding principle of the United Nations, Governments and private institutions, organizations and enterprises.” http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/42/ares42–187.htm. This definition has not been without controversy. See also Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything, 85–96; Stephen M. Wheeler and Timothy Beatley, eds., The Sustainable Urban Development Reader. Sustainability is similar to conservation, in the sense of selective use of material resources for human benefit. In some parts of the world, including the United States, conservationists clash with strict preservationists, who struggle to save wilderness for its own sake. In East Asia, pure preservation enjoys a small albeit vocal support base that calls for protecting “pristine nature,” forgetting that the “pristine” is itself always in flux, in no small part because of the human presence. 9. Exceptions were regarded as aberrations in the discourse of national strength and progress, an inevitable downside to the trajectory of increasing national wealth. Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. It never formally colonized China but subjected it to severe cultural, economic, political, and military pressure from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Japan seized Manchuria (northeast China) in 1931 and in 1932 proclaimed it the nominally independent state of Manchukuo. But in fact Manchukuo was Japan's puppet state, an informal, de facto colony. Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “Introduction,” 8. 10. Tu Wei-ming describes this dynamic in “The Continuity of Being.” See also Ole Bruun, “Fengshui and the Chinese Perception of Nature.” For a summary of conventional Chinese perceptions of nature and relationships between people and the nonhuman, see Feng Han, “Cross-Cultural Confusion,” 253–54. 11. In Topophilia, Yi-Fu Tuan gives the example of changing attitudes toward mountains, noting that as in the West, “the change was from a religious attitude in which awe was combined with aversion, to an aesthetic attitude that shifted from a sense of the sublime to a feeling for the picturesque; to the modern Page 461 →evaluation of mountains as a recreation resource.” Even so, as late as the Tang (618–906), with the primary exceptions of Daoist images featuring people dwarfed by large mountains, humans were the principal focus of paintings; it was in the Song (960–1279) that “mountain and water” landscape painting achieved dominance (71–72). 12. Vaclav Smil, China's Past, China's Future, 142. Smil asserts that this has been the case for 5,000 years, but because of the lack of historical records in the region that predate approximately 1000 B.C.E., we can only be certain of the last three millennia. See Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 29–68; The Retreat of the Elephants, 321. China's population grew from more than 50 million before the end of the first millennium B.C.E. to 100 million shortly after 1000 C.E., to 200 million in the early 1700s, to 400 million by 1850, to 1.3 billion today. Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 30. See also John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier, 112. Overpopulation has been a concern of Chinese intellectuals since well before the Common Era. The philosopher Han Feizi (280–233 B.C.E.), for instance, complained that people did not understand how having five children would result in very little for any one person. Cited in Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support? 5. 13. Vaclav Smil, China's Past, China's Future, 142. Mining in China also dates to prehistoric times.

14. Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 36–37. For early examples of desertification see Eduard B. Vermeer, “Population and Ecology along the Frontier in Qing China,” 237–38. Mark Elvin has observed that despite a wide spectrum of attitudes concerning optimal human interactions with environments, “The Chinese landscape was one of the most transformed in the pre-modern world as the result of its reshaping for cereal cultivation, re-engineering by hydraulic works for drainage, irrigation and flood-defense, and deforestation for the purposes of clearance and the harvesting of wood for fuel and construction.” Mark Elvin, “The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China,” 9. Neither Confucianism nor Neo-Confucianism promotes outright exploitation of environments. In fact, leading figures such as Wang Yangming (1472–1529) aspired to bring individuals into meaningful relationships with both people and landscapes. Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Touching the Depths of Things,” 60. But Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, like Daoism, have been used to justify pollution. Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, “Culture and Asian Styles of Environmental Movements,” 226. 15. Some have even argued that seemingly benign institutions also harmed environments. For instance, Buddhist temples have preserved trees within their borders, even when the surrounding landscape has been deforested. But it was Buddhism that introduced cremation to China, and from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries cremation was so common in the southeastern coastal provinces that it notably affected timber resources there. Likewise, the same poetry and other writing that so lauded environments also allegedly contributed to their demise. The black ink used in writing required soot, which came from burnt pine. Even before the Tang the mountains of Shandong had been deforested to meet this need. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behavior,” 247. See also Yushi Mao, “Evolution of Environmental Ethics,” 45–46. Page 462 → 16. See Nicholas Wade, “Adventures in Very Recent Evolution.” 17. George Borgstrom, World Food Resources, 203. Cited by Donald Worster, Dust Bowl, 4. Worster dates this deforestation to 3000 B.C.E. As Clive Ponting notes in A New Green History of the World, China was the second area of the world to adopt agriculture (48). 18. Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 29. 19. Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 39. 20. Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perceptions of and Behavior toward the Natural Environment,” 42. For more on deforestation in early China see Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 19–85. Recultivating land left fallow by wars or natural disasters was a priority for much of China's imperial period. 21. Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perceptions of and Behavior toward the Natural Environment,” 40. 22. Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 40. 23. Ming intellectuals deplored deforestation because of its effect on soil quality and the lost ability to restrain “barbarians.” Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behavior,” 242. The Qing attempted to keep northeast China as a hunting preserve for Manchus. They also began to set aside spaces for sightseeing and recreation, safeguarding species that otherwise would have been endangered. Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 40. 24. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Transformation of China's Environment,” 130. 25. Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perceptions of and Behavior Toward the Natural Environment,” 43. See also Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 51. 26. See, for instance, the Song of Gold and Silver, translated in Mark Bender, Butterfly Mother, 11–70. 27. Randall A. Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon, I. The interconnectedness of hydraulics and state power in China led the scholar Karl Wittfogel to declare dynastic rule “oriental despotism,” a type of government founded on the need to negotiate between agricultural demands and scarce water resources. Randall A. Dodgen, 3. Although many of Wittfogel's ideas have been discredited, he rightly distinguishes between farming economies that involve small-scale irrigation (hydroagriculture) and those that involve large-scale and government-managed works of irrigation and flood control (hydraulic agriculture). See Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, 3. For more on water control in early China see Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 115–64. 28. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 11. King Wu (r. 1046–1043 B.C.E.). 29. For more on the unsustainability of early Chinese agricultural practices, see Robert B. Marks, “Commercialization without Capitalism,” 74, and Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt. See also Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth; Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power. Radkau emphasizes the subjectivity of value

judgments concerning China's environmental crises. 30. Mao Zedong lived from 1893 to 1976. Unless otherwise noted, my discussion of environmental crises under Mao is drawn from Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 47–57, and Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature. Page 463 → 31. Needless to say, this policy had devastating consequences. Without sparrows insect populations thrived and contributed to the famines that killed millions. 32. As Elizabeth C. Economy summarizes, “Mao's vision for China as a great power soon brought about a renewed cycle of population growth, accelerated in-discriminate mobilization of resources in preparation for war, and grand schemes for economic development, which, in turn, contributed to severe environmental degradation and social turmoil.” Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 47. Mao celebrated China's growing population, which increased from 540 million in 1950 to 930 million in 1976 despite the massive famines resulting from the Great Leap Forward. Economy, 50, 53. See also Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China, 343–44. 33. Judith Shapiro, Mao's War against Nature, 8. Afforestation was not un-known in Maoist China; the Party claimed that annually 100 million citizens worked to transform “deforested China into a green paradise” by planting millions of hectares. Vaclav Smil, “China's Environment,” 169–74. 34. Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, 19. Deng Xiaoping (1904– 1997). 35. A sampling of these posters can be found at http://chineseposters.net/themes/environment.php. In the 1980s, the Confucian concept of “the unity of Heaven and human” (tian ren heyi) occupied a prominent place in Chinese cultural debates. Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, 100–106. It remains a cornerstone of Chinese environmental consciousness. Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 201–11; Judith Shapiro, Mao's War against Nature, 213. 36. Qu Geping and Li Jinchang discuss the relationship between population and environmental issues in China in Population and the Environment in China. See also Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child and Governing China's Population; He Bochuan, China on Edge, 1–20; James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity. For detailed demographic data see Baochang Gu, “The Arrival of Low Fertility in China.” 37. Michael Wines, “Liang Congjie.” Liang Congjie (1932–2010) was the grandson of the prominent Chinese reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929). Zhu Rongji was born in 1928. For more on NGOs in China see Peter Ho, “Sprouts of Environmentalism in China?” Only a fraction of environmental NGOs in China are registered with the government. 38. Jim Yardley, “Beneath Booming Cities.” See also Charles C. Mann, “The Rise of Big Water,” 122–40; Andrew C. Mertha, China's Water Warriors; Michael Richardson, “Asia's Shaky Water and Energy Balancing Act”; Jim Yardley, “Choking on Growth, Water and China's Future.” For more on water crises worldwide see Alex Prud’homme, The Ripple Effect. 39. Sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted cities are in China, while two-thirds of 300 Chinese cities recently tested by the World Health Organization failed to meet international standards and only 1 percent of the nation's 560 million city residents breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes.” See also Andrew DeWit and Jonathan Watts, “Clean Coal and the Two Page 464 →Faces of China's Coal Industry”; Andrew Jacobs, “As China's Economy Grows.” Lead poisoning also remains a problem. Sharon LaFraniere, “Lead Poisoning in China.” 40. Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan, 1866–1925) was the founding ideologue of the Chinese republic. 41. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Transformation of China's Environment,” 143; Edward Wong, “Three Gorges Dam.” 42. Shai Oster, “Floating Garbage Chokes Major Chinese Dam.” 43. Jim Yardley, “Chinese Dam Projects Criticized for their Human Costs.” See also Dierdre Chetham, Before the Deluge; Dai Qing, ed., The River Dragon Has Come!; Gorild Heggelund, Environment and Resettlement Politics in China; “TED Case Studies, Three Gorges Dam.” For more on the relationship between dams and earthquakes in China see Sharon LaFraniere, “Scientists Point to Possible Link Between Dam and China Quake”; Peter Navarro, “Earthquake Repercussions Spur Rethinking of China's Dam Building Strategy.” 44. For more on China's trash concerns see Keith Bradsher, “China's Trash Problem May Also Be the

World's,” A1, A10. Unless otherwise indicated, statistics on China's environmental degradation are from Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, 33. See also Judith Shapiro, “China: A Foreword.” For conditions circa 1990 see He Bochuan, China on the Edge. For conditions circa 2010 see Jonathan Watts, When a Billion Chinese Jump. 45. Liu Yu et al., “The Politics and Ethics of Going Green in China,” 31; Jianguo Liu, “China's Environment in a Globalizing World”; Jianguo Liu et al., “Protecting China's Biodiversity.” For more on biodiversity and conservation, particularly in the post-Mao years, see Richard B. Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China. For a historical perspective see Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change. Wang Tao and Wu Wei discuss contemporary desertification in “Sandy Desertification in Northern China.” Measures such as Toyota's Green Greater Beijing Economic Zone Fengning Afforestation Project, implemented the fall of 2011 and aiming to reduce desertification in the northern part of Hebei Province, hardly seem sufficient to address China's water shortages. “New Toyota Afforestation.” 46. Most notable were China's “Green Olympics,” which were preceded by significant tree planting in Beijing as well as temporarily removing automobiles from city roads. On the other hand, as noted in the introduction, optimistic reports of decreased air pollution during the Olympics have been questioned. For more on environmental policy in China more generally, see Kristen Day, ed., China's Environment; Lester Ross, Environmental Policy in China. Also significant have been China's efforts at wilderness conservation. See Feng Han, “Cross-Cultural Confusion.” 47. See Kristen Day, ed., China's Environment; Richard Louis Edmonds, ed., Managing the Chinese Environment; Howard W. French, “Far from Beijing's Reach.” The subtitle to Bill McKibben's article “Can China go green?” captures well the ambiguity of Chinese relationships with environments: “No other country is investing so heavily in clean energy. But no other country burns as much coal to fuel its economy” (117). 48. Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, 256. Peter C. Perdue cites the Page 465 →recent poisoning of infants by tainted milk additives. Richard C. Hoffmann et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1459. For more on the efforts of grassroots organizations in remediating degradation to China's environments see Liu Yu et al., “The Politics and Ethics of Going Green in China.” Cf. Bryan Tilt, The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China. 49. Richard C. Hoffmann et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1459–60. See also Joseph Kahn, “In China, a Lake's Champion Imperils Himself.” 50. See Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 13. 51. Judith Shapiro, “China: A Foreword,” 27. 52. In 2007, for instance, opponents of a chemical plant being built in Xiamen (China's southeastern coast) were able to suspend construction by texting nearly everyone in the city on the dangers of the plant. See Xie Lei, Environmental Activism in China; Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China. 53. In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim, “Introduction: The Environment-Security Nexus in Northeast Asia,” 4. China's environmental problems have also affected Russia. The 2005 explosion at the Jilin Chemical Industrial Company in northeastern China resulted in one hundred tons of benzene and other chemicals being spilled into the Songhua River, a tributary of the Heilong River (Amur River), which forms the border with the Russian Federation, continues into the Russian Federation as the Amur River, and flows into the Sea of Okhotsk. See In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim, “Introduction: The Environment-Security Nexus in Northeast Asia,” 5. 54. Milton Osborne, “The Mekong River Under Threat”; Michael Richardson, “Dams in China Turn the Mekong into a River of Discord”; Geoffrey Gunn and Brian McCartan, “Chinese Dams and the Great Mekong Floods of 2008.” For more on what China has done to environments in Southeast Asia, see Amarjit Kaur, “Race, Gender and the Tin Mining Industry in Malaya.” Although China is not the only culprit in Southeast Asia (Laos recently submitted a proposal to build a major hydropower dam on the Mekong), it has constructed more than 85,000 dams within its borders and plans to build many more, particularly in the west and south. These dams weaken surrounding soil, making large areas subject to devastating floods, landslides, and other “natural” disasters. The danger they pose was brought home in August 2010, when massive mudslides in the Gannan Tibetan autonomous district of Gansu Province killed more than 1,000 people. See Furuya Koichi and Minemura Kenji, “China, Fearing Unrest.”

55. M. K. Bhadrakumar, “China Resets Terms of Engagement in Central Asia.” 56. “China Boss in Peru.” 57. Howard W. French, “The Next Empire?” 58. See, for instance, Ian Taylor, China's New Role in Africa, 42–62. Chinese have also been attracted to Africa's nonferrous metals and fisheries. Taylor, 44. Significant as well are their illegal imports of African ivory, which threaten to drive Africa's elephants into extinction. See Michael Casey et al., “Will Asian Hunger for Ivory Doom Africa's Elephants?” 59. Peter Bosshard, “China's Overseas Dam Builders.” 60. Jared Diamond, Collapse, 359; Jianguo Liu, “China's Environment in a Globalizing World”; Andrew Revkin, “As China Goes, So Goes Global Page 466 →Warming.” China has also been implicated in deforestation in Russia. See Raffi Khatchadourian, “The Stolen Forests.” 61. Jared Diamond, Collapse, 370. See also Jianguo Liu and Jared Diamond, “China's Environment in a Globalizing World”; Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler, “China Grabs West's Smoke-Spewing Factories.” 62. Orville Schell, “‘Self-reliance’ No Longer an Option for China.” 63. Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 94. The Classic of Poetry contains writings that date back as far as the tenth century B.C.E. Stephen Owen, ed., An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 10. 64. Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 94. 65. Zuo Si's (250–305) “Summoning the Recluse” differs notably from predecessors. Whereas earlier recluses had been urged to return from wilderness, in this poem an individual is called to return to wilderness. Underlying this change was the replacing of shamanism with a combination of Confucian ethics and Daoist teachings. Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 96–97. While Zuo Si's work emphasizes the pleasures of wilderness over those of human society, and farmstead poetry such as Tao Yuanming's (Tao Qian, 365–427) “Gui yuantian ju” (Returning to Live in My Gardens and Fields) highlights nearly complete harmony with the cultivated nonhuman, landscape poetry such as Xie Lingyun's (385–433) “Yu nanshan wang beishan jing huzhong zhan tiao” (What I Observed as I Crossed the Lake on My Way from Southern Mountain to Northern Mountain) features appreciation of spaces with a limited human presence. 66. David Hinton, Mountain Home, 5; Wendy Swartz, “Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry,” 121. 67. For more on poetry from this period, and Chinese landscape and nature poetry in general, see Dai Qinxiang, Shanshui tianyuan shi zhuan; Donald Holzman, Chinese Literature in Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 1–189; Ding Chengguan, Zhongguo shanshui shi shi; Gao Renxiong, Shanshui shici lungao; Liu Hongling, Xing zai jianghai zhi shang; Tabei Fumio, Chgoku shizenshi no keifu; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, 127–28; Xiaoshan Yang, To Perceive and to Represent; Zhang Maohua, Qi Lu shanshui shiwen daguan. 68. David Hinton, Mountain Home, xiii–xxi; Zong-qi Cai, “Introduction: Major Aspects of Chinese Poetry,” 3. Although neglected in the centuries after their deaths, Tao Yuanming and Xie Lingyun regained prominence in the Tang, leading to the flowering of landscape and farmstead poetry in that period as well as in the Song. For reception and reconfiguration of Tao Yuanming's work in later generations see Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming; Xiaofei Tian, Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture. David Hinton overviews trajectories in land-scape poetry in Mountain Home, focusing on writings by Bai Juyi (772–846), Du Fu (712–770), Du Mu (803–853), Han Shan (7th–9th c.), Jia Dao (779– 843), Li Bai (701–762), Liu Zongyuan, Meng Haoran (689–740), Meng Jiao (751–814), Wang Wei (699–761), Wei Yingwu (737–792) from the Tang; and Fan Chengda (1126–1193), Lu Yu (1125–1210), Mei Yaochen (1002–1060), Su Dongpo (1037–1101), Wang Anshi (1021–1086), and Yang Wanli (1127–1206) from the Song. For more on Tang poetry and ecology see Wang Zhiqing, Sheng Tang shengtai shi xue. For more on the domesticated nonhuman in writing from Page 467 →the Tang and Song see Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere. Ivo Smits discusses reception of this poetry in Japan in The Pursuit of Loneliness. For conceptions of nature in later Chinese cultural production see Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections, 222; Paolo Santangelo, “Ecologism versus Moralism.” 69. For more on this phenomenon in Chinese landscape painting, see Martin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?” Significant exceptions include the Chuci (Lyrics of Chu, 1st c.), where wilderness tends to be demonized. Most poems in the Lyrics of Chu are attributed to Qu Yuan (340–278 B.C.E.). Xiaoshan Yang,

“Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 95, 99. For comparative perspectives of wilderness see Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness. Scholarship on nature in premodern Chinese literature abounds. Helpful sources in addition to those cited above include Li Jinghua, Ziran xiezuo yu huanjing yishi yanjiu; Obi Kichi, Chgoku bungaku ni arawareta shizen to shizenkan and Zhongguo wenxue zhong suobiaoxian de ziran yu ziranguan; Gary Snyder, “Kich k en”; Maeno Naoaki, Fgetsu mujin; Zhuti Wenxue Xueshu Yantaohui, Ziran de shuxie. Allegory in classical Persian poetry on nature provides a fruitful comparison with the Chinese case. See Houman Sarshar, “From Allegory to Symbol.” See also Stephen A. Norwick, The History of Metaphors of Nature. Daniel J. Philippon discusses the power of metaphor in nature writing in Conserving Words, while in “Literary Animal Agents” Susan McHugh urges scholars to read literary animals literally, not only in terms of metaphor. This is especially important in cases of severe animal abuse such as that described in the British writer George Orwell's (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–1950) essay “Shooting an Elephant” (1936). 70. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 42. 71. “Mowing Grasses” begins, “We mow the grasses and fell the trees, / we till the churning soil.” Stressing that trees are constantly being felled and grasses forever being mowed, the song concludes, “It's not that this is only temporary / it's not that this is something happening only now/ From times of old it has been like this.” Translation adapted from Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 250–51. See also Stephen Owen, “Reproduction in the Shijing.” Cf. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature, 276–88. 72. Translation adapted from Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 193–96. In the Classic of Poetry “Great Odes” (Daya) on the founding of the Zhou invariably mention if not celebrate the clearing of grasses and trees for crops. For more on ecological vision in the Classic of Poetry see Sridharan Madhusudhanan, “The Joy of Being a Tree.” 73. Zhang Yingchang, ed., Qing shi duo, 446. In “The Bell of Poesy” Mark Elvin gives numerous examples of depictions in Zhang Yingchang's (1790–1874) anthology of fuel shortages and other forms of environmental degradation, in writings by Jiang Tingyi (1602–1645) and others. 74. This translation of Du Fu's poem is from Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 432–33. Perceived “uselessness” also saves the massive oak in Zhuangzi's famed parable: When asked by his apprentice why he passed by a towering oak without a second glance, the carpenter responded, “It's not a timber tree—there's nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be that old!” Page 468 →Later that night, the tree appears to the carpenter in a dream, and it declares, “The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs—as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey…And it's the same way with all other things.” Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson, See also the Taiwanese writer Cai Zhizhong's (1948–) adaptation Ziran de xiaosheng: Zhuangzi shuo (The Music of Nature: Zhuangzi Speaks, 1987). Emphasis on the longer lives enjoyed by “useless” trees appear throughout literature, including in the Japanese writer It Hiromi's (1955–) novella “Hausu puranto” (Houseplant, 1998), where the narrator attributes the proliferation of eucalyptus trees in California to their perceived uselessness. 75. Liu Zongyuan, “Xing lu nan,” 1240–41. 76. Mark Elvin discusses this poem and numerous other premodern Chinese literary depictions of ecodegradation in The Retreat of the Elephants. 77. See Xie Lingyun, “Shanju fu.” 318–34. 78. Joanna F. Handlin Smith, “Liberating Animals in Ming-Qing China,” 52. Bai Juyi (772–846); Su Shi (1037–1101). 79. Ibid., 53. In a clear case of ecoambiguity, releasing animals can harm ecosystems. For instance, in 1988, the Taipei Wild Bird Society called attention to the environmental harm caused when liberated animals become so-called “invasive species.” Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 216. 80. Joanna F. Handlin Smith, “Liberating Animals in Ming-Qing China,” 53. 81. Wang Taiyue (1722–1785), “Tongshan yin,” 927–28. 82. Lu Xun (1881–1936), “Qiuye,” 566. Lu Xun's Wild Grass remains popular with East Asian readers, the Korean publisher lyu Munhwasa putting out an illustrated version, titled Yach’o, in October 2010.

83. Henry David Thoreau, Journal 7: 514. Cited by Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 209. 84. Lu Xun, “Qiuye,” 566. 85. See “Nahan zixu,” the preface to Nahan (Call to Arms, 1922), Lu Xun's first collection of short stories. 86. Shen Congwen (1902–1988), “Wuge jun’guan yu yige meikuang gongren,” 285. 87. Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shen Congwen and Imagined Native Communities,” 425. 88. David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China, 250–53. 89. Mu Shiying (1912–1940), “Shanghai de hubuwu,” 255. 90. Ibid., 249. 91. Ibid., 259. 92. See Shen Congwen's “Biancheng” (Border Town, 1934) and “Zhangfu” (Husband, 1930). Also important in this regard are Xiao Hong's (1911–1942) Shengsi chang (The Field of Life and Death, 1935) and Hulanhe zhuan (Tales of Hulan River, 1942). One well known exception is Wen Yiduo's (1899–1946) poem “Sishui” (Dead Water, 1925), which urges people to continue polluting Page 469 →their “ditch of dead water” (i.e., China torn by civil war), a ditch completely devoid of beauty, so that the hopeless world might be destroyed and a new existence created out of its ruins. Jiayan Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich,” 17. Other exceptions are writings on war, which tend to speak of traumas inflicted not only on people and their built environment but also on the natural world. 93. Chen Jingrong, “Dushi huanghun jijing.” 94. Kirk Denton, “Literature and Politics,” 463–69. 95. Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 105. 96. Guo Moruo (1892–1978), “Zhou maque.” Also significant is Lao She's (1899–1966) drama Longxugou (Dragon Beard Ditch, 1951), adapted into a film of the same name in 1952 and restaged at Beijing's Capital Theatre in 2009 in honor of the 110th anniversary of its author's birth. 97. “Socialist realism” can be understood as “revolutionary romanticism combined with revolutionary realism.” See Ban Wang, “Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism.” Perry Link identifies a “socialist literary system” operating in China from about 1950 to 1990, with a ten-year hiatus during the Cultural Revolution. See Perry Link, The Uses of Literature. 98. Yang Mo (1914–1995), Qingchun zhi ge, 5. 99. Immediate postwar Chinese writings on World War Two also reference Japanese wartime abuse of Chinese resources. See Lao She's novel The Yellow Storm (1951), the abridged English translation of Lao She's Si shi tongtang (Four Generations under One Roof). The first two sections of Four Generations under One Roof were published during the war, but the third part was first published in The Yellow Storm, its Chinese-language version remaining unavailable until 1982. 100. More prevalent than literature during the Cultural Revolution were the yangban xi (model plays). 101. Kirk A. Denton, “Historical Overview,” 299–301. See Wang Ning, “Globalizing Chinese Literature,” for a reperiodization of post-Mao literature. 102. Jia Pingwa was born in 1952 and made his name in the 1980s. 103. Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 11. Despite such claims, Japanese literature, like that from many other sites, both exposes environmental woes and celebrates environmental protection. In recent years Chinese scholars have followed Wang Nuo's lead in speaking not of huanjing wenxue (environmental literature) but of shengtai wenxue (ecological literature). See Wang Nuo, Oumei shengtai wenxue (2003). Wang was inspired by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm's edited volume The Ecocriticism Reader (1996). See also Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 11; Zeng Fanren, ed., Ren yu ziran. Despite this trend most creative writers in China continue to refer to their writings that address environmental concerns as “environmental writing,” not as “ecological writing.” Personal communication from ecocritic Long Juan, April 14, 2010. The term lüse wenxue (lit. green literature) has been used in China since the early 1990s. 104. Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chgoku no kanky bungaku,” 262. Citing Li Bingyin, “Wenxue yu huanjing suoyi,” 94. Strictly speaking, as references to environmental degradation in premodern Chinese literature indicate, Chinese Page 470 →“environmental literature” predates the 1980s by two millennia, but the term huanjing wenxue does not appear to have been used before the late twentieth century, nor is it regularly applied to writings from before 1980. For an alternative definition of environmental literature see Zeng Yongcheng, Wenyi de lüse zhi si, 325. While much 1980s environmental writing took the form of reportage,

in the 1990s it became increasingly diversified. Zeng Yongcheng, Wenyi de lüse zhi si, 325. 105. Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 11. 106. Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shen Congwen and Imagined Native Communities,” 425; Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chgoku no kanky bungaku,” 259–60. Japanese have been translating Shen Congwen's work since the 1930s. Although he lived until the late 1980s, Shen Congwen stopped writing in 1949. Excellent examples of roots-seeking literature are Zhang Chengzhi's novellas Beifang de he (Rivers of the North, 1984) and Hei junma (The Black Steed, 1982). Mark Leenhouts, “Culture against Politics,” 537–38. Also admired by writers of roots-seeking literature was the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1927–), whoseCien años de soledad (Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) was translated into Chinese in 1982. 107. Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chgoku no kanky bungaku,” 260. 108. Judith Shapiro, “China: A Foreword,” 27. 109. Some important figures who engaged with these concerns in their 1980s and 1990s writings include A Cheng, Chen Yingsong (1956–), Cong Weixi (1933–), Gao Hua (1954–), Gao Xingjian, Guo Xuebo (1948–), Han Shaogong, Jia Pingwa (1952–), Li Qingsong (1966–), Liang Xiaosheng (1949–), Liu Xinwu (1942–), Ma Bo (1947–), Shen Rong (1936–), Shi Tiesheng (1951–), Su Tong (1963–), Wang Anyi (1954–), Wang Meng (1934–), Wang Lixiong, Xu Gang (1945–), Zhang Jie (1937–), Zhang Kangkang (1950–), Zhang Wei (1956–), Zhe Fu, and Zheng Yi (1947–). Many of their texts have been translated into English, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. 110. A Cheng's King of Trees is analyzed in the following chapter. 111. Shen Rong was born in 1936. 112. Su Tong, “Shu nong,” 158. 113. Ibid., 165. 114. Fujii Shz, “Kaisetsu,” 594. In his “Nobel Lecture” (1994), e (1935–) declared that he aligned himself with writers such as Zheng Yi: “For me the brotherhood of world literature consists in such relationships in concrete terms…I am now deeply worried about the destiny of those gifted Chinese novelists who have been deprived of their freedom since the Tiananmen Square incident.” The Japanese newspaper Asahi shinbun published the letters Zheng Yi and e wrote to one another. 115. Cited by Fujii Shz, “Kaisetsu,” 594. Flaming Green Tree was translated into Chinese in 2001; Zheng Yi here indicates his familiarity with Japanese literature, which was not limited to works by e. 116. Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 215. 117. “Loggers, Wake Up!” was not Xu Gang's (1945–) first piece of environmental reportage. It was preceded by such texts as “Chenlun de guotu” (Our Sinking Land, 1985). Page 471 → 118. See Dai Qing (1941–), Hongse jingbao; Harrison E. Salisbury, The Great Black Dragon Fire. Other important nonfiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s who addressed environmental concerns include Li Yueshi, Liu Guixian (1945–), Wei An (Ma Jianguo, 1960–1999), Zhao Xinshan (1938–), and Zhou Yuming. Liu Guixian established himself as an environmental nonfiction writer with his literary reportage “Zhongguo de shui wuran” (Water Pollution in China, February 1989); he is best known for his nonfiction work Shengming zhi yuan de weiji (Crisis of the Source of Life, October 1989). Although most concerned with the contemporary global water calamity, this text draws from an array of Chinese and foreign sources and speaks of environmental crises throughout history around the world. Also noteworthy are Zhao Xinshan and Zhou Yuming's collaborative nonfiction Bi tiankong geng guangkuo (Broader than the Sky, 1992) and Diqiu zai kuqi (Earth is Sobbing, 1994); the latter condemns environmental degradation the world over. Wei An's embrace of deep ecology separates him from most of his contemporaries. He is best known for his engaged ecocosmopolitanism, vegetarianism, harsh censure of industrial society, and idealization of rural, agrarian life. Only one volume of his writings was published during his lifetime, Dadi shang de shiqing (All that Happens on the Earth, 1995). See Zhou Yulin, “‘All that Happens on the Earth’”; Wei Qingqi, “Shengtai yizhi de wenxue biaoshu.” 119. Most members of ASLE are professors, while most members of China's Society of Environmental Literature are writers. Personal communication from ecocritic Professor Long Juan, April 14, 2010. 120. Wu Dingbo, “Environmental Literature,” 302. For more on Green Leaves and the challenges it has faced see Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chgoku no kanky bungaku,” 271–74; Sekine Ken, “Itan to shizen,” 288–90. For other Chinese journals incorporating discussion of literature and environment see Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue zhi xianzhuang,” 78.

121. See, for instance, Yang Mo, “Rang dadi chongman lü,” 6. 122. Excellent examples are Yu Chaoran and Gao Hua's Lüse sanchong zou and Yang Zhaosan and Gao Hua's Lü caodi, lü caodi. Both are composed of texts published between 1984 and 1990 in the Zhongguo huanjingbao (China Environmental News). 123. Jia Pingwa is also known for his novel, Tumen (Earth Gate, 1996), where many “illegal” (unregistered) dogs are hanged. 124. Tang Yaming [Tan Yamin; T Amei], “Hon’yaku kki,” 504–5. 125. An Boshun, “Henja no kotoba,” 13–14. Other prominent twenty-first-century Chinese writing on wolves includes Guo Xuebo, Langhai (Wolf Child, 2006), Damo langhai (The Wolf Child in the Desert, 2001), following his Shalang (Desert Wolf, 1996). Chinese also have been translating foreign writings on wolves. See Chengzhou He, “Poetic Wolves and Environmental Imagination.” Cf. The Korean writer Chn S ngt’ae's (1969–) “Nkdae” (Wolves, 2006), a short story that gives alternate perspectives on wolves, Mongolia, and transnationalism. 126. On their blogs China's younger writers, including the youth-culture idol Han Han (1982–), express anger at the ecological degradation of their country, suggesting that environmental concerns will remain an important part of Chinese Page 472 →literary production in the decades to come. For more on Han Han in English see Evan Osnos, “The Han Dynasty.” Also important in this context is the literary production of Chinese émigré writers such as Gao Xingjian and Wang Ping (1957–). 127. In the last decade, in addition to writing on environmental consciousness in English-language literatures and translating Western ecocriticism, scholars in China have published on the ecological sensitivity of Chinese writers ranging from early luminaries such as Tao Yuanming to twenty-first-century figures. Scott Slovic notes in particular the work of Lu Shuyuan and Zeng Fanren on ecological consciousness in early Chinese writers. See Scott Slovic, “Editor's Note,” 425. Scholarship on the relationship between Asian thought on Western environmental writers likewise has flourished. See Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim; Zhong Ling, Meiguo shiren Shinaide [Snyder] yu Yazhou wenhua. Principal texts and figures in contemporary Chinese ecocriticism include Long Juan, Huanjing wenxue yanjiu; Lu Shuyuan, Shengtai wenyixue; Wang Nuo and Chu Chen, “Shengtai weiji yu Zhongguo wenxue”; Wei Qingqi, “Zouxiang yizhong lüse jingdian”; Zeng Fanren, ed., Ren yu ziran; Zeng Yongcheng, Wenyi de lüse zhi si. For additional figures see Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue zhi xianzhuang,” 77–78. Chinese scholars also have sponsored international conferences on literature and the environment, drawing counterparts from across East Asia as well as the Americas and Europe and increasingly from other continents. One of the earliest such gatherings was held in Weihai in 1995 and was co-chaired by Wang Meng. More recent meetings include the International Conference on Literature and Environment, held in November 2008 at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, and the Ecological Literature and Environmental Education International Conference held in Beijing in August 2009. For a list of national conferences in China on environment and literature see Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue zhi xianzhuang,” 78. 128. For ecology and art in China see Gregory Levine, “Silenced by Aesthetics?”; Wu Hung, Displacement. Chen Kaige's (1952–) Huang tudi (Yellow Earth, 1984) is often regarded as China's first ecologically oriented film. Recent Chinese cinema addressing damming and water concerns in China includes Tian Zhuang-zhuang's (1952–) Delamu (The Last Horse Caravan, 2004) and Jia Zhangke's (1970–) Sanxia haoren (Good People of the Three Gorges [Still Life], 2006). The documentary filmmaker Wang Bing's (1967–) Tong dao (Coal Money, 2008) and epic fourteen-hour film Caiyou riji (Crude Oil, 2008) highlight the difficult lives of miners and oil workers while also revealing the damage these industries inflict on ecosystems. Chinese films dealing with deforestation include Chen Kaige's Haizi wang (King of the Children, 1988), Lü Le's (1957–) Meiren cao (The Foliage, 2004), and Qi Jian's (1958–) Tiangou (The Forest Ranger, 2006). Jiayan Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich,” 293, n. 42. Noteworthy as well is the Chinese Francophone writer and director Dai Sijie's (1954–) filmic adaptation of his novel Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2000; film 2002). The novel and the film describe the experiences of two young men sent to a village in Sichuan Province during the Cultural

Revolution. While the novel wraps up in 1974, the film concludes at the turn of the twenty-first Page 473 →century with the flooding of the village brought on by the Three Gorges Dam. For more on Chinese film and environment see Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema. 129. Conrad Totman, Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan, 2. As Totman notes, while early inhabitants of the spaces that today are known as Japan and Korea might well have been partially responsible for the loss of the region's mega-fauna, and while their fires burned areas of woodland, their numbers were so small and per capita demands on ecosystems so slight that they did not notably change their environments (29–30). Unless otherwise noted, this section is drawn from Totman's discussion. Ann Kumar discusses Japan's transition to an agricultural society in Globalizing the Prehistory of Japan. For more on environment in early Korea see Kim Ukdong, Hanguk i noksaek munhwa. 130. Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago, 9. 131. For more on land clearance in early Japan see William Wayne Farris, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan. 132. To give one example, in the eighth century there was a national campaign to build temples in every province of Japan then under imperial control. The three million cubic meters of wood that monasteries used between 600 and 850 was only a fraction of the wood commoners and nobles used in their homes. See Paul Gleason's discussion of timber usage in temple building in “Works and Woods,” 47–48. 133. In Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan Conrad Totman notes that the existing environmental damage would have been remediable within several generations had these sites not continued to be exploited (94). 134. For more on land use in Japan at this time see William Wayne Farris, Japan's Medieval Population. Medieval Japan likewise was one of the planet's most active mining nations. Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907, 12. 135. Ken Akiyama and Bruce Allen discuss And (1703–62) in “Pre-Modern Japanese Nature Writing,” 281–83. 136. By 1721 Edo (now Tokyo) was larger than any European city. Susan B. Hanley, “Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan,” 1. See also Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch’ing China and Tokugawa Japan. Brett L. Walker discusses ecologies outside Japan's urban centers in The Conquest of Ainu Lands, while Azby Brown examines the more “sustainable” lives of Tokugawa Japanese in just enough. 137. John F. Richards summarizes Tokugawa strategies to limit forest destruction in The Unending Frontier, 148–92. See also Conrad Totman, The Lumber Industry in Early Modern Japan and The Origins of Japan's Modern Forests. For more on recycling in the Tokugawa period see Azby Brown, just enough; Ei-Ichiro Ochiai, “Japan in the Edo Period.” Gregory Levine notes that contributing to the air pollution and deforestation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan was the nation's thriving ceramics industry. Gregory Levine, “Silenced by Aesthetics?” 138. In The Lost Wolves of Japan Brett Walker documents the transformation of these animals in Japan from a revered to an extinct species. 139. Both English- and Japanese-language scholarship on Japan's modern environmental crises, movements, and policies abounds. For overviews of environ Page 474 →mental degradation in twentieth-century Japan see Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 359–75; Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago. For a summary of English-language studies of Japanese environmental history see Robert Stolz, “Nature over Nation,” 417–18. See also Norie Huddle et al., Island of Dreams; David Suzuki and iwa Keib, The Other Japan. 140. Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 359. 141. Kichiro Shoji and Masuro Sugai, “The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Case,” 22, 27; Fred Notehelfer, “Japan's First Pollution Incident.” 142. Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan, 158–59. For more on the Ashio mine incident, Tanaka (1841–1913), and the shifts in Japanese consciousness that resulted see Alan Stone, “The Japanese Muckrakers.” For more on Tanaka's thought see Robert Stolz, “Nature over Nation” and “Remake Politics, Not Nature”; Kenneth Strong, Ox against the Storm. 143. Norie Huddle et al., Island of Dreams, 32–33; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Environmental Problems and Perceptions in Early Industrial Japan,” 762–63. Today the Yanaka reservoir is a site of “nature recreation.” Robert Stolz, “Re-make Politics, Not Nature.” See also Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907. 144. Kichiro Shoji and Masuro Sugai, “The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Case,” 44.

145. For more on Tatematsu (1948–2010) and the Ashio Green Growing Association see Robert Stolz, “Remake Politics, Not Nature.” 146. See Tak Watanabe, “Corporate Environmentalism?” Shisaka Island is located approximately 20 kilometers from Niihama. 147. It was not until the 1950s that cadmium released from mines in Toyama Prefecture in the Japan Sea was identified as the cause. 148. Masako Gavin, “Nihon fkeiron (Japanese Landscape).” For more on Shiga (1863–1927) see Masako Gavin, Shiga Shigetaka; Kamei Hideo, “Nihon kindai no fkeiron”; Richard Okada, “‘Landscape’ and the Nation-State.” 149. This belief is noteworthy considering that practices such as tree felling were recognized as a menace even during the Tokugawa period. On the other hand, concomitant with early twentieth-century urbanization were new forms of appreciation; as in other regions, East Asian urbanites became interested in the conservation of resources. City people tended to be the most outspoken conservationists, whereas those living in rural areas advocated continued use of land for fertilizer-assisted agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Also important is the difference between physical “environment” and “nature” as powerful political and ideological elements in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. As Julia Adeney Thomas has pointed out, “nature in political terms moved from being that which Japan must investigate in order to arrive at true political forms to that which Japan is, the truth itself…There is no necessity of ‘nature’ to mean ‘environment’ as we look back at past usages.” Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 3, 5. See also Julia Adeney Thomas, “‘To Become as One Dead,’” 308–30. 150. Much of Japan's current forestland is a result of 1950s reforestation. The Nature Conservation Society of Japan (Nihon Shizen Hogo Kykai) was founded in 1951 to promote ecological and biological diversity and conservation. 151. Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 359. Page 475 → 152. Arsenic poisoning also became a significant problem in Japan, particularly in Toroku, where arsenic mining began in 1920 and ended in 1962. As Timothy S. George has noted, “The changes brought about by the intrusion of this new age of chemicals [in the early twentieth century] into Toroku linked this small hamlet and the poison produced there to global wars, the global economy, and the global environment…Toroku was being poisoned because of the expanding global market for arsenic.” Timothy S. George, “Toroku: Mountain Dreams, Chemical Nightmares.” 153. Robert Hernan lists Minamata disease as the earliest of the fifteen “worst environmental disasters around the world.” Robert Hernan, This Borrowed Earth, 9–29. Minamata attracted the attention of literary artists across Asia, writers in Thailand, for instance, publishing on the disease in the 1970s and 1980s. Hiramatsu Hideki, “Tai ni okeru Nihon bungaku.” 154. Timothy S. George, Minamata, xviii–xviv, 17. Scholarship on Minamata disease is vast. See Kada Yukiko et al., “From Kogai to Kankyo Mondai,” 112–37; Jun Ui, “Minamata Disease”; Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago, 137–75. 155. On July 8, 2009, for the first time since 1995, the Japanese Diet enacted a law offering financial relief to increased numbers of Minamata victims. However, this law also allows Chisso to divide into two parts, effectively “putting an end to the liability saga” after it completes this most recent set of compensation payments. Alex Martin, “New Minamata Relief Law Enacted.” On April 16, 2010 the Japanese cabinet approved a measure to provide relief to those who claim to suffer from Minamata disease but until now have been ineligible for financial assistance. See “Relief for Unrecognized Minamata Victims.” And on May 1, 2010, Hatoyama Yukio (1947–) became the first Japanese prime minister to attend a memorial service for those killed by Minamata disease. He took this opportunity to apologize for the government's failure to prevent the spread of the disease. See “Hatoyama Apologizes.” By April 2011 nearly 3,000 additional previously unrecognized Minamata disease patients had reached a negotiated settlement of their compensation lawsuits against Chisso and the central and Kumamoto prefectural governments; more than 41,000 people have applied for these separate relief measures, but concerns remain that even more are eligible for benefits yet are too ashamed to come forth. “Minamata Disease Settlement.” As Timothy S. George explains: “Minamata is a story not just of the environmental and human costs of rapid ‘modernization,’ but also of a callous and murderous corporation hiding its guilt; of the collusion and confusion at all levels of government and society, including the scientific community and the media, that

allowed the tragedy to happen and then to be covered up; of powerful pressures against speaking out and taking action; of stigmatization and ostracism in the local society of a company town; of popular politicization and grass-roots movements; of the social constraints on these movements and on individuals; and of the persistence and adaptation of ‘traditional’ uses of language and religion and concepts of moral economy.” Timothy S. George, Minamata, 8. See Ikuta Shgo, “Kotoba, basho, kydtai,” for the relationship between Minamata disease and environmental justice concerns. 156. See “Minamata Sufferers in Niigata to Get Relief”; Hisashi Sat, Niigata Minamata Disease. By 2001, approximately 2,200 individuals had been Page 476 →officially recognized as Minamata disease patients and 800 as Niigata Minamata disease patients. The actual number of people who contracted Minamata disease is unknown. See also Masazumi Harada, “Minamata Disease and the Mercury Pollution of the Globe.” Mercury pollution has been a concern in Canada, China, Brazil, East Africa, and the Philippines. In May 2010 the Japanese government announced plans to promote an international agreement to regulate mercury use. See “Japan Promotes Minamata Treaty.” 157. “Minamata Exhibition.” 158. See, for instance, Jeffrey Broadbent, “Movement in Context”; Hasegawa Koichi, Constructing Civil Society in Japan; Margaret McKean, Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan. 159. Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese Perceptions of Nature”; Higuchi Kentaro, ed., PCB Poisoning and Pollution; Margaret McKean, Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan. 160. Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 362. In 1999, Japan emitted nearly 40 percent of the world's dioxin and furan. As of 2008, only 7 percent of its sandy beaches were without any concrete, levees, or other human structure and supported six or more types of plants. “Study: Only 7% of Nation's Sandy Beaches ‘Natural.’” For more on problems of trash disposal in Japan see Vivian E. Thomson, Garbage In, Garbage Out. 161. Richard J. Samuels, “Securing Japan,” 133. Okinawa has been particularly harmed. See “Living with the Nightmare of Planes”; Hayashi Kiminori et al., “Overcoming American Military Base Pollution in Asia”; Koji Taira, “Okinawan Environmentalists”; Kunitoshi Sakurai, “Okinawan Bases”; Yoshikawa Hideki, “Dugong Swimming in Uncharted Waters.” For more on Japan's troubled legacy with nuclear power see Daniel Aldrich, “The Tohoku Disaster”; “Japan Nuclear Disaster”; Kaneko Masaru, “Plan to Rebuild Japan.” e has gone so far as to assert that the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima was “like ‘a third atomic bombing’ that the country inflicted on itself.” See “Nobel Laureate e.” 162. Stephen Hesse, “Accountability at Atsugi,” 13. See also Catherine Knight, “Natural Environments, Wildlife, and Conservation in Japan.” For up-to-date printed information on Japanese environmental conditions see the Japanese Ministry of the Environment's annual White Paper: Kankysh, ed., Kanky hakusho. 163. Nakasone (1918–) was prime minister between 1982 and 1987. 164. Pradyumna P. Karan discusses several of these movements in Japan in the 21st Century, 366–75. See also Pradyumna P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma, eds., Local Environmental Movements; Miranda A. Schreurs, Environmental Politics in Japan, Germany, and the United States. 165. Since the early 1990s, for instance, the theme of the Tokyo Motor Show has been the environment. Kamahori Miki, “Cooling Japan.” In 2009 the Japanese government announced its Green New Deal strategy to encourage both economic growth and environmental conservation. See “Government to Embrace ‘Green New Deal.’” For more on Japan's efforts to integrate economic and environmental concerns see Brendan Barrett, ed., Ecological Modernization and Japan. For more on environmental policy in Japan see Hidefumi Imura and Miranda A. Schreurs, eds., Environmental Policy in Japan; Peng Er Lam, Green Page 477 →Politics in Japan; Klaus Vollmer, ed., kologie und Umweltpolitik in Japan und Ostasien. 166. For examples of ecopropaganda see the email newsletter Highlighting Japan through Articles. See also Brian Moeran and Lise Skov, “Mount Fuji and the Cherry Blossoms.” To promote more ecologically responsible consumerism the Japanese government in 2009 established an ecopoint system whereby people earned points for purchasing ecofriendly products, primarily energy-saving appliances. The points were used to help purchase other appliances deemed environmentally friendly. Slogans urging people to conserve resources now are paradoxically printed on many plastic shopping bags in Japan. 167. Makoto Watanabe, “The Scientist Emperor and His Love of Nature.” 168. At the turn of the twenty-first century, for instance, Aichi Prefecture proposed felling a large forest to

build homes for the 2005 World Exposition; the theme of this expo ironically was “Living in Harmony with Nature.” Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 363. See also Yoshimi Shun’ya, “A Drifting World Fair.” Pressure from the World Expo ruling body and a citizens’ group defeated this proposal. Another more subtle example is the recent effort to have spaces in Japan internationally certified as “global geoparks” or “geological inheritance parks.” This designation allows landscapes to be “preserved and utilized as natural parks,” something that will almost certainly increase tourism. “Japan's Green Zones Itchy to be Global Geoparks.” For more on the tensions between lofty rhetoric and daily practice in Japan see Peter Wynn Kirby, Troubled Natures. 169. In September 2010 Japan proposed a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly that 2011–20 be declared the United Nations Decade of Biodiversity to facilitate efforts to preserve various species. “Japan to Propose 2011– 2020 U.N. Decade of Biodiversity.” Japan likewise supports forest conservation efforts in developing countries. “Japan Vows Forest Conservation.” See also Eric Prideaux, “Japan's Green Strides Belie Spotty Record,” 3; Hiroko Tabuchi, “Japan Sets Emissions Targets.” Before the March 2011 Fukushima disaster there was hope that nuclear energy would help reduce the nation's emissions. David McNeill, “Out of the Shadows.” Global warming is a serious concern. The summer of 2010 was one of the hottest on record; August 2010 was Japan's warmest since 1946. “Japan's Hottest.” The heat has decreased the food supply of black bears, and more than 150 were killed in 2010 after encroaching on residential areas, even entering homes and schools. “Officials Warn of Spike in Bear Attacks.” Bear encounters are becoming a problem in many parts of Japan, experts blaming changing weather patterns, a decrease in hunters, and an increase in abandoned farm fields. “Shiritai!” 170. Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 363. 171. With two-thirds of its land area covered by forests, Japan is somewhat greener than the world's land surface as a whole; Japan meets about 80 percent of its timber needs by import. See Yoshiya Iwai, ed., Forestry and the Forest Industry in Japan. See also Peter Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest; Owen Cameron, “Japan and South-East Asia's Environment”; Rene E. Ofreneo, “Japan and the Environmental Degradation of the Philippines”; Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power, 117. On the other hand Japanese NGOs such as the Japan Volunteer Page 478 →Center are assisting Southeast Asian communities in managing their forests. Reiji Yoshida, “Helping Laotians Keep their Forests.” The typical conservationist view of Japanese whaling popularized in the American media in the 1980s is that of a devious Japan claiming to be doing research but in fact pillaging the ocean. Japan countered, among other things, that the Japanese hunted only the relatively plentiful minke whales, while the Inuit of North America continued to hunt the endangered bowhead whale under an exemption from the international moratorium. Jessamyn R. Abel, “The Ambivalence of Whaling,” 330–31. These arguments have not made Japanese whaling any less of an international target. In the Australian Robyn Williams's (1944–) novel 2007 (2001), which depicts global weather systems as devastating the planet, whales sink a Japanese whalehunting submarine. In Whaling in Japan Jun Morikawa discusses the disparities between the political fiction and environmental realities surrounding Japanese whaling. Some industries in Japan capitalize on whale populations without killing them. Whale-watching cruises off Hokkaido bring in much needed revenue; these are quite popular since at certain times of year tourists have a 50 percent chance of seeing a migrating killer whale. It is probable that increased mercury content in whale and dolphin meat will result in people consuming fewer of these animals. “Taiji Mercury Levels Extremely High.” As portrayed in the Oscar-winning documentary film The Cove (2009) approximately 2,000 dolphins are killed in Taiji (southern Japan) each year. Japanese take the lives of about 20,000 dolphins annually, but Taiji is the only place in the country where they are herded and then killed. As shown in the film, in a blatant act of environmental ambiguity, Taiji puts on dolphin shows during which audience members can consume dolphin meat. Tremendous rightwing opposition in Japan to showing The Cove delayed its release there. “‘The Cove’ Back on Again.” In April 2010 officials at the Yokota Air Base (a United States Air Force Base) canceled scheduled showings of the film so as not to offend the Japanese. The film's director responded by distributing free copies to residents of the base. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Japan's Noisy Far Right.” On November 2, 2010, Taiji hosted the first meeting between activists and hunters, but the event was chaotic, despite being tightly controlled, and

no compromise was attempted. For a recent report on controversy concerning Japan's overfishing of highquality tuna see Eric Johnston, “Seafood Policy Seen Negating Moral Authority”; Yamada Takao, “‘Maguroky’ jidai.” Japan likewise has a thriving black market in African ivory. See Michael Casey et al., “Will Asian Hunger for Ivory Doom Africa's Elephants?” 172. In 2009 the number of Japanese children under age fifteen decreased for the twenty-ninth straight year; children are a smaller percentage of the Japanese population than that of any other nation. “Japan's Child Population Drops.” For comparative perspectives on fertility trends in East Asia see Gavin Jones et al., eds., Ultra-low Fertility in Pacific Asia. Nearly all discourse on shshika (declining birthrate) in Japan and elsewhere focuses on the demographic challenges this phenomenon will instigate and remains silent on how it might improve ecosystems. Even Florian Coulmas's 1,189-page edited volume The Demographic Challenge includes virtually nothing on the effect fewer people will have on Japan's physical environment. For alternate perspectives see Robert Engelman, More: Page 479 →Population, Nature, and What Women Want; Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal, 140–57; Norie Huddle et al., Island of Dreams; Ahihiko Matsutani, Shrinking-Population Economics; Fred Pearce, The Coming Population Crash; Andre Sorensen, “Towards Livable Communities in Japan?” Pearce, for instance, argues that the aging of the world's population, because of declining birthrates across the planet, is a positive development, one that will result in a “less frenetic and hopefully more humane—a kinder, gentler, wiser, and greener world” (249). 173. Julia Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 8. Thomas gives numerous examples of Japanese assertions that the Japanese people's unique love of nature provides both the nation's aesthetic guidelines and a foundation for environmental stewardship. 174. The Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) went so far as to declare nature the center of Japanese literature and people the center of European literature. Cited in Haruo Shirane and Unno Keisuke, “Ekokuriteishizumu [Ecocriticism] to Nihon bungaku,” 126. Shirane and Unno caution that although Shiki exaggerates, there is merit to his argument. For a succinct comparison of views of nature in Japanese and European literatures see Nonaka Ry, “Nihon bungaku ni okeru shizenkan.” 175. Nonaka Ry, “Nihon bungaku ni okeru shizenkan,” 59. 176. Ibid., 61–62. 177. Sonja Arntzen, “Natural Imagery in Classical Japanese Poetry,” 66. 178. Criticizing the constructedness of Japanese perceptions of nature in the face of environmental crises is the Japanese writer Noma Hiroshi (1915–1991), who in “Kanky, shigen mondai” argues for reforming Japanese literature by overthrowing conventional understandings of beauty. In “Natural Imagery in Classical Japanese Poetry,” Sonja Arntzen argues that in classical Japanese literature nature often is more immanent than metaphorical, even when used metaphorically (54–67). See also Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry.” 179. Haruo Shirane and Unno Keisuke highlight the constructedness of nature in early Japanese literature, noting for instance the differences between seasonal phenomena as codified in creative work and as evident in the experienced world. Haruo Shirane and Unno Keisuke, “Ekokuriteishizumu [Ecocriticism] to Nihon bungaku,” 118–32. For an introduction to impermanence in Japanese literature and culture more generally see Charles Shir Inouye, Evanescence and Form. 180. Notable exceptions to depictions of an innocuous nonhuman include the waka poet Kamo no Chmei's (1155–1216) famed zuihitsu (loose, miscellaneous prose) Hjki (Ten-Foot Square Hut, 1212), which describes fires, typhoons, floods, earthquakes, and aftershocks that devastate the city of Kyoto. At the same time, Chmei emphasizes that much of the human suffering that accompanies these disasters stems from attachment to impermanent human constructions; Chmei abandons the city and finds comfort in the hills, where he declares flowers and the moon among his best friends. 181. Scholarship on perceptions and uses of nature in classical Japanese literature abounds. Some helpful sources include Baba Akiko, Kaku sakitaraba; Furuhashi Nobuyoshi et al., eds., Shizen to gijutsu; Hiroshima Jogakuin Daigaku Kkai Kza Ronsh Nihon Bungakka, ed., Shizen to Nihon bungaku; Komori Page 480 →Yichi et al., eds., Tsukurareta shizen; Hoyt Long, “Grateful Animal or Spiritual Being?” 21–58; Nishida Masayoshi, Nihon bungaku no shizenkan; Sat Yasumasa, ed., Bungaku ni okeru shizen; Sait Shji, Nihonteki shizenkan no henka katei and Nihonteki shizenkan no kenky; Seko Katashi, Nihon bungaku no shizen kansh; Ivo Smits, The Pursuit of Loneliness; Tokuda Susumu, Shink Nitch hikaku sansui bungaku.

182. Edwin Cranston, A Waka Anthology, 164. See also Sylvie Broseau, “Perception and Representation of Famous Sites in Japanese Culture”; Kamigaito Ken’ichi, Tyteki shizenkan no saihakken; Kawamura Kojir, Man’ybito no biishiki; William R. LaFleur, “Saigy and the Buddhist Value of Nature,” 203–4; Noda Hiroko, Man’ysh no jokei to shizen; David Shaner, “The Japanese Experience of Nature,” 165–66; Shimoda Tadashi, Man’y no kach fgetsu. 183. Man’ysh 4, 9–11. 184. Haruo Shirane, ed., Traditional Japanese Literature, 64. As Torquil Duthie has pointed out, the references to kunimi in Nara texts are so diverse that they point less to a single, specific ritual than a “diffuse rhetoric of ‘envisioning the realm’ that drew from a variety of disparate sources and models.” Duthie, “Envisioning the Realm.” 185. Ibid. Jomei's ability to see what ordinary mortals cannot points to his ties to the “other world” of spirits and gods. Mt. Kagu is a mere 152 meters high. 186. Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago, 11. 187. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) intriguingly inverts these tropes of occupation in the sixth part of “Vacillations” (1931–32): “A rivery field spread out below, / An odour of the new-mown hay / In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou / Cried, casting off the mountain snow, / ‘Let all things pass away.’ // Wheels by milk-white asses drawn / Where Babylon or Nineveh / Rose; some conqueror drew rein / And cried to battle-weary men, / ‘Let all things pass away.’” 188. Hara Skei (1718–67), “Lu pang mu,” 251. 189. Oka Kunsh (fl. ca.1814), “Gu zhan chang,” 261. 190. Toriyama Shiken (1655–1715), “Chun ri jiao xing jing gu cheng mu you gan,” 198. 191. Du Fu, “Chun wang,” 43. 192. Michael Fuller explores other ambiguities of Du Fu's poem in “The Aesthetic as Immanent Assent to Pattern,” 74–78. 193. Matsuo Bash (1644–1694), Oku no hosomichi, 84. For more on this phenomenon, see Karen Thornber, “Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Environmental Crises.” Scholars have variously interpreted Sora's rewriting Du Fu's claim that “grasses and trees grow deep” (cao mu shen) with “grasses grow green” (kusa ao mitari). Also contesting Du Fu's assertions are writers such as Sakai Kozan (1798–1850), who in “Sengakuji” (Sengaku Temple) argues that “The mountain peaks might crumble and the oceans might overturn, but the souls of the forty-seven ronin will never fade.” And Hideo, Nihon kanshi hyakusen, 122–23. 194. Matsuo Bash, Oku no hosomichi, 81. Page 481 → 195. A similar phenomenon is at play in the Tokugawa Confucian scholar and kanshi poet It Jinsai's (1627–1705) verse on his journey to Ichijji (1697). The speaker first celebrates the gorgeous autumn scene—the vast green landscape through which he travels features clouds mingling with trees, geese flying by, crows feasting on ripe persimmons, and thickly growing mushrooms. He then remarks: “The city so far away, I never see dusty haze.” The poem's speaker explicitly notes the absence of pollution where he is standing and alludes to its presence elsewhere. See It Jinsai, “Ichijji ni asobu,” 193. 196. Yoshida Kenk (1283–1350), Tsurezuregusa, 187. 197. Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 29. Karatani highlights the work of Kunikida Doppo, particularly “Musashino” (Musashi Plain, 1898) and “Wasureenu hitobito” (Unforgettable People, 1898) and their articulations of people-as-landscape. In these texts Doppo makes the case for commemorating even the most ordinary of landscapes and people. As Richard Okada has noted, the viewpoint valorized in texts such as Doppo's is one of “panoramic appropriation,” Doppo's text not representing “landscape or ‘nature’ that preexist their installation in discourse.” Richard Okada, “‘Landscape’ and the Nation-State,” 104. The construction of this landscape was accompanied by that of Hokkaido, a supposedly vast, awe-inspiring wilderness that appeared for the most part untouched by human hands. Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 41. Hokkaido occupied a significant presence in the Meiji literary imagination, including in works by Doppo, Arishima Takeo (1878–1923), and Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912). For more on realism, shaseibun (sketching), impressionism, and early twentieth-century Japanese literary portrayals of the nonhuman, see Nakada Masatoshi, Akutagawa Ry nosuke bunsh shugy; Nakao Masaki, Taish bunjin to den’en shugi; Sait Shji, Nihonteki shizenkan no henka katei; Sud Matsuo, Kindai shiika no shizen; Suzuki Sadami, “Nihon kindai bungaku ni miru shizenkan”; Watanabe Masao, “Kindai ni okeru Nihonjin no shizenkan.”

198. As Hoyt Long notes in “On Uneven Ground,” Nagatsuka's (1879– 1915) Tsuchi was “the first truly sustained and sympathetic account of Japanese farming life to be written in fictional form” (275). See also Tomoko Aoyama, Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, 48–57; Kajiki G, Nagatsuka Takashi; Kajiki G and Kawai Tru, eds., Nagatsuka Takashi “Tsuchi” sakuhinron shsei. 199. Arishima Takeo, Kain no matsuei, 94. 200. Sat Haruo (1892–1964), Den’en no yutsu, 50. 201. Miyazawa's children's stories frequently attempt to increase environmental awareness in the younger generation. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 51. 202. See Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), Aru otoko sono ane no shi. For more on environmentality in Miyazawa's writing see Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 163–241; Komori Yichi, Saishin: Miyazawa Kenji kgi. For more on animals in Shiga's oeuvre, including his short story “Kinosaki ni te” (At Kinosaki, 1917), which features a young man's meditations on dead animals and his accidental killing of a water lizard, see Sud Matsuo, Nihon bungaku no shizen, 185–201, and Shiga Naoya no shizen. As Alan Tansman notes in The Page 482 →Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, “At Kinosaki” proceeds through “simple assertion—through kotodama, the magical power of words” (138). Other Japanese writings on the Ashio mine include the Japanese Communist Party cofounder Arahata Kanson's (1887–1981) Yanakamura metsubshi documentary text (History of the Collapse of Yanaka Village, 1902); shika Taku's (1898–1959) documentary novel Watarasegawa (Watarase River, 1941) and its sequel the historical novel Yanakamura jiken (The Incident at Yanaka Village, 1957); Shiroyama Sabur's (1927–2007) Shinsan (Bitterness of Life, 1961) and its sequel “Sd” (Strife, 1979). These texts celebrate Tanaka Shz and other activists and focus primarily on human suffering. 203. Yi Sang (1910–37), “Tonggyng,” 95–96. 204. Ibid., 97. 205. This was true of both creative work and nonfiction, including essays by Kawai Masao (1924–), Kaik Ken (Takeshi, 1931–1989), Takada Hiroshi (1932–), Miki Taku (1932–), and Ishimure Michiko. Shgo Ikuta, “Modern Japanese Nature Writing,” 278. See also Takashi Kinoshita and Masataka Ota, “Nature in Modern Japanese Literature.” 206. For more on ecological concerns in Japanese literature of the atomic bomb see Karen L. Thornber, “Degendering Ecodegradation and Rethinking Ecofeminisms”; “Ecocriticism and Japanese Literature of the Avant Garde”; “Responsibility and Japanese Literature of the Atomic Bomb.” Sharalyn Orbaugh discusses images of the “atomic body” in Japanese literature of the atomic bomb in Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation, 202–12. 207. Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951), Ukigumo, 195, 273. Also noteworthy is Miyao Tomiko's (1926–) novel Shuka (Red Summer, 1985), which depicts Japanese in Manchuria as wasting so much water that they anger local gods. 208. Hayashi Fumiko, Ukigumo, 234. Texts such as Floating Clouds provide important corollaries to European colonial fiction. See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Serpil Oppermann, “Ecological Imperialism”; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature. 209. Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), Koto, 358. 210. For more on Japanese reception of Rachel Carson, see Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 157–58, 224–25, 235. Reconfiguration of Western-language environmental writing has continued, including that of J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, translated into Japanese as Dbutsu no inochi by Mori Yukiko and Ozeki Shji in 2003. 211. Ishimure Michiko and Arahata Kanson, “Seimin no keifu,” 173. Cited in Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 79. The year 1970 also witnessed the republication of shika's Watarase River (1941); its sequel was reprinted in 1972. 212. Nitta (1912–1980) wrote a number of creative works on the dangers facing ecosystems in Japan and elsewhere, including Arasuka monogatari (Tale of Alaska, 1974), discussed in Chapter 2. 213. Ishimure's writing does not focus solely on Minamata disease; she has published on a variety of the challenges facing contemporary societies. 214. Published in 1969, Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land discusses the first fifteen years of the Minamata

tragedy. For analyses of this text see chapters Page 483 →2 and 5. Kamigami no mura (Villages of the Gods), the second part of Ishimure's Minamata trilogy and serialized between 1970 and 1971, takes the reader to the December 1970 Chisso stockholders meeting. The third part, Ten no uo (Fish of Heaven), was published in 1974. Both Villages of the Gods and Fish of Heaven focus on the suffering of Minamata patients and the struggles of these individuals and other concerned parties against the Chisso Corporation and the Japanese government. Also noteworthy is Ishimure's Noh play Shiranui (2003), a requiem to the victims of Minamata disease. Wakamatsu Michiko, “Ishimure Michiko's Tetralogy.” For a brief introduction to Ishimure's life and writings, as well as the cultural imaginary of Sea of Suffering, see Livia Monnet, “‘A Book for the Future’”; “‘In the Beginning Woman Was the Sun.’” 215. For more on Ishimure and Sea of Suffering, see Chapter 2. For more on Ariyoshi (1931–1984) and Compound Pollution see Tomoko Aoyama, Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, 89–92; Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 146–90; Yoko McClain, “Ariyoshi Sawako.” Compound Pollution was translated into Korean four times (in 1967, 1988, 1990, and 1991), and into Chinese (in Taiwan) in 1993; Sea of Suffering was translated into Korean in 2007, but it served as a resource to Korean writers long before then. Also noteworthy is the case of Morisaki Kazue (1927–), a Japanese environmental activist, prolific writer, and former colleague of Ishimure's. Morisaki was born and raised in Korea. She had difficulty adjusting to Japan after relocating there in 1944 so traveled around the country seeking out marginalized individuals and places. Her first book, Makkura: jokfu kara no kikigaki (Pitch Dark: Stories Narrated by Female Miners, 1961) is a collection of the oral tales of women coal miners and addresses environmental justice concerns. Masami Raker Yki, “New Life, New Language.” 216. Karen Colligan-Taylor discusses Descendants of the Mist and Memories of Mountain Peaks in The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 191–214. Watanabe was born in 1933. 217. Nitta wrote extensively on Japan's mountains and the importance of conservation. For more on the place of Mount Fuji in his oeuvre see Nait Michio, Kobushi no hana, 157–96, and “Nitta Jir to shizen”; Takahashi Chihaya, “Nitta Jir to Fujisan.” See also Nitta Jir Kinenkai, ed., Nitta Jir bungaku jiten. Tsuda Hiroyuki discusses the Japanese “discovery of nature” as this phenomenon relates to Mount Fuji in Tkokuz k s josetsu. 218. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 211. 219. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices, 2, 83. 220. Charles Inouye, Evanescence and Form, 194. Komatsu's (1931–2011) Japan Sinks has been translated into Chinese several times; the first translation was published in 1975. For background on Tsutsui and Komatsu see William O. Gardner, “From Parody to Simulacrum.” 221. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 225–29. 222. For more on Kayano (1926–2006) see Tsutomu Takahashi et al., “The Conservation Movement and Its Literature in Japan,” 292. 223. In 1988 Amano (1953–) spearheaded a movement of fishers, nature Page 484 →writers, and concerned individuals from outside the Nagara River area; this movement grew into a coalition of approximately 16,000 members. Kada Yukiko et al., “From Kogai to Kankyo Mondai,” 162. 224. Distant Thunder was translated into Chinese in 1980 and other writings by Tatematsu in the 1980s and 1990s. Also noteworthy is Tatematsu's more recent Shiretoko mori to umi no inori (Prayer for Shiretoko Forest and the Sea, 2006). 225. Much of It Hiromi's earlier writing also concerns animals, including “Eigo, Nihongo, Kanokogo” (English, Japanese, Fawnese, 1987), “Kanoko goroshi” (Fawn Murder, 1985), and “Koyte” (Coyote, 1987). Taguchi Randy's (1953–) Konsento was translated into Chinese in 2003. 226. See Yki Masami Raker, “Mizu no oto no kioku,” for more on Taguchi's Yakushima. 227. Thank you to Michio Arimitsu for bringing Ikegami Eiichi's (1970–) work to my attention. 228. Until recently Japanese scholars of literature and environment have like-wise focused largely on Western-language literatures. As Scott Slovic has noted, “one of the oddities of this entire process of building a constituency for environmental literature in Japan is the fact that most of the Japanese scholars involved with ASLE are actually specialists in American or British literature.” “Of Frogs, Old Ponds,” 234. An excellent example of this phenomenon is Kamioka Katsumi's “Kanky bungaku nymon,” 1–22. Although titled “Introduction to Environmental Literature,” this article focuses almost entirely on Western writers and environmentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Carson, all of whom have

long been popular in Japan. Kamioka, a scholar of American literature, devotes fewer than two pages to Japanese literature and environment. Most of the articles appearing in the journal Bungaku to kanky (Literature and Environment, est. 1998), published by ASLE-Japan (Bungaku Kanky Gakkai; The Association for the Study of Literature & Environment, est. 1994) continue to focus largely on Western writers and literatures. One notable exception is the 2007 volume, which contains a number of articles on Korean literature and environment. Other Japanese journals publishing ecocritical articles include Ekokuriteishizumu reby (Ecocriticism Review, est. 2008), published by the Ekokuriteishizumu Kenkykai (The Society for Ecocriticism Studies [in Japan]). In addition, the July 2010 issue of the Japanese journal Suisei tsshin was devoted to “Ekokuriteishizumu” (Ecocriticism), while the journal Ajia ygaku dedicated its July 2011 issue to “Nihon bungaku to ekokuriteishizumu” (Japanese Literature and Ecocriticism). And the theme of the 2010 International PEN Congress, held in Tokyo, was “Environment and Literature.” 229. American nature writers have been incorporating Asian ideals since at least Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau. David Landis Barnhill, “East Asian Influence on Recent North American Nature Writing,” 291. As Barnhill suggests, the impact of East Asian religious and philosophic ideals of relationships between people and landscapes has been more profound than that of particular literary works. Scholarship on the connections between Japanese and Western literatures abounds. For an early study see Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature. A more recent work on Page 485 →the early history of these interconnections that includes discussion of environments is Susan Napier, From Impressionism to Anime. Napier notes how it “was in depictions of nature or outdoor scenes that…Japanese art was most influential…it is in Monet's varied portrayals of the natural world that critics have found some of the most interesting and subtle influences from Japanese art” (41). 230. Gary Snyder lived in Japan from 1956 to 1968, and his work has been translated into Japanese by Sakaki and others since the mid-1970s; Sakaki's Japanese-language writing has been translated into English since the 1960s. Sakaki wrote some of his poetry and prose in English. Other American poets who befriended Sakaki include Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Michael McClure (1932–), and Joanne Kyger (1934–). The volume Nanao or Never: Nanao Sakaki Walks Earth A, edited by Gary Lawless, collects photographs, poems, sketches, stories, and reports by American, Japanese, and other writers and environmentalists on their interactions with Sakaki; it foregrounds the appeal of Sakaki and his work to a broad range of individuals. For more on Snyder and Japan, including inter-textualizations of Japanese literature in his creative work, see Yamazato Katsunori, “Seeking a Fulcrum.” See also Patrick Murphy, ed., Critical Essays on Gary Snyder. For more on Snyder and East Asia see Yamazato Katsunori, “Gr Sunaid [Gary Snyder] to Higashi Ajia.” 231. Yamao (1938–2001) was close friends with Snyder in the 1960s and then from the mid-1990s until his death. He wrote on a variety of environmental issues, including Chernobyl. See also Nagakari Mayuri, “‘Jijitsu’ to shite.” 232. Gary Snyder, “Foreword by Gary Snyder,” ix. 233. Other East-West environmental/literary symposia include one organized in 1987 by the Russian ecologist, novelist, and politician Valentin Rasputin (1937–), which brought together Tatematsu Wahei and other leading figures from the Japanese and Soviet literary spheres; this was the first of a number of dialogues between Russian and Japanese writers. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, iii. In 1996, writers and scholars from the newly founded ASLE-Japan (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, est. 1994) and ASLE-US (est. 1992) held a symposium on Japanese and American environmental literature at the University of Hawaii. Environmental writers who attended included Ishimure Michiko and Hino Keiz (1929–2002) from Japan and W. S. Merwin (1927–), David Quammen (1948–), and Linda Hogan from the United States. Scott Slovic, “Of Frogs, Old Ponds,” 234. Hino's novel Yume no shima (Dream Island, 1985) depicts Tokyo as a beautiful but empty shell. In September 2010 Japan hosted the 76th annual International PEN Congress, the theme of which was “Environment and Literature”; the Japan PEN club selected one hundred volumes of Japanese environmental literature for a publication distributed at the congress. “Environmental Literature.” 234. In 2005 members of ASLE-Japan and ASLE-Korea collaborated on a panel session at ASLE's biennial conference in Eugene, Oregon. Two years later, ASLE-Japan and ASLE-Korea held a three-day joint symposium in Kanazawa, Japan, where papers were given in Japanese, Korean, and English, with simultaneous interpretation. Sin Munsu celebrates the significance of this meeting in “Bungaku/kanky kenky no tame,” rightly noting that just as environmental problems have many causes and readily cross

national borders so too must people Page 486 →of different nations work together for solutions (283). He also calls for the creation of an “environment network” of writers and scholars of literature from across East Asia (Japan and Korea in particular). Similarly, in her plenary speech at the 2008 conference on “Contemporary Literary Environmentalism in East Asia,” Japanese scholar Masami Raker Yki discussed the importance of building intra–East Asian ecocritical networks. See Masami Raker Yki, “Towards the East Asian Network of Ecocriticism.” In 2009 historians of East Asia founded the Association of East Asian Environmental History; chances are this group will provide a model for intra–East Asian scholarly collaboration on literature and the environment. Members can find inspiration in the activities of transnational environmental activist networks such as those Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues describes in Global Environmentalism and Local Politics. And in the fall of 2010 (October 30—November1) ASLEJapan and ASLE-Korea held their second joint symposium, this time in Seoul, featuring speakers from Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, and the United States; most of the symposium papers focused on East Asian literatures. Ecology, Consumption, and Otherness. Scholarship comparing environmental literature in Japan and Korea dates at least to the mid-1980s, with such articles as Sait Bun’ichi, “Kin Shika [Kim Chiha] to Miyazawa Kenji.” Recent Japanese-language edited volumes on literature and the environment have included contributions from multiple East Asian as well as Western nations. See Ikuta Shgo et al., eds., “Basho” no shigaku, which has a section on Japanese literature, one on Korean literature (including an essay by the Korean poet Ko n), and one on Gary Snyder by scholars from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States; Yamazato Katsunori et al., Shizen to bungaku no daiargu, which contains essays by Ko n and the Taiwanese nature writer Liu Kexiang. Significant as well is Ko n and the Japanese writer Yoshimasu Gz's (1939–) coauthored volume “Ajia” no nagisa de: Nikkan shijin no taiwa (On “Asian” Shores: Dialogue between a Japanese Poet and a Korean Poet, 2005) and particularly Sagawa Aki and Kwon Taekmyng [Kuon Tekumyon]'s coedited and cotranslated Chiky wa utsukushii: Nikkan kanky shisensh (The Earth is Beautiful: Selection of Japanese and Korean Environmental Poetry, 2010), which includes the works of more than 350 writers in Japanese and Japanese-language translation. Sagawa and Kwon's volume also gives not only the Japanese pronunciation of Korean poets’ names, as is customary in Japanese-language translations, but also the Korean pronunciation of Japanese poets’ names. On the other hand, it does not give Korean translations of the Japanese poems. The sheer number of writers involved in this project suggests a bright future not only for environmental literature in Japan and Korea but also for collaboration between Japanese and Korean writers. Also very promising is Simon Estok and Kim Won-Chung's edited volume East Asian Ecocriticisms, now in preparation. These and similar intra–East Asian contact spaces are likely to strengthen in coming years as interactions among writers from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan continue to increase and as local and global environmental concerns become more urgent. 235. Sat's dates are 1957–2007; Kat was born in 1977. The first film on Minamata disease—Tsuchimoto Noriaki's (1928–2008) Minamataby—kanjasan to sono sekai (Minamata Disease—Patients and Their World, 1971)—Page 487 → was followed by many others on this illness. See Takamine Takeshi, “Ishimure sakuhin o yomu,” 131–64. Another noteworthy film is Kamanaka Hitomi's (1958–) Rokkasho Rhapsody, focusing on individuals affected by nuclear power plants. See Kamanaka Hitomi et al., “Rokkasho, Minamata and Japan's Future.” 236. For more on Miyazaki (1941–), anime, and apocalypse see Marc Hairston, “A Healing, Gentle Apocalypse”; Susan Napier, Anime, 193–218. 237. Susan Napier, Anime, 175–92. For more on anime and the environment see Ursula K. Heise, “Miyazaki Hayao to Takahata Isao.” 238. Susan Napier, Anime, 180. Another intriguing example of anime addressing human encroachment on environments is Takahata Isao's (1935–) Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko (Heisei Badger Wars, 1994). Threatened with extinction as Tokyo's Tama New Town continues expanding, badgers transform themselves into a variety of creatures, some of which can survive in the new built environment. Also noteworthy is Kawamori Shji's (1960–) animated television series Arjuna (Chiky shjo Arjuna; Earth Maiden Arjuna, January 9–March 27, 2001), which features a high school student entrusted with saving the planet. After the March 2011 Thoku disaster the acclaimed female manga artist Yamagishi Ryko (1947–) made her

“Phaeton,” inspired by the Chernobyl accident and published in 1988, available online free of charge; this manga has inspired considerable discussion, indicating the continuing importance of creative works in helping peoples grapple with environmental crises. Television broadcasts have also played an important role in awakening Japanese environmental consciousness, including the NHK special Amerika Walden shisaku no tabi (A Meditative Journey to America's Walden, 1994), which encouraged viewers to read Walden and to “call for the protection of their own loved places.” Walden has been translated into Japanese more than a dozen times since 1911, and it has inspired countless Japanese writers. Katsumi Kamioka, www.thoreausociety.org. 239. Carter J. Eckert et al., Korea Old and New, 271. Ko n speaks of one of these dams in “Sup’ungho,” an intriguing poem that describes a man chipping away at the immense Supung Dam (on the Yalu River, between China and North Korea) for decades until the entire structure collapses. Supung Lake subsequently drains to reveal ancient tombs from the Kogury (37 B.C.E.–668 C.E.) and Palhae (Unified Silla, 668–935) periods. The poem claims that the man long ago had pledged “to demolish the Supung Dam and resuscitate the old river”; he concludes with a comment that until the Supung Dam is rebuilt, “the Yalu River will have returned to the Yalu River of old.” Yet as the poem highlights, there are many “old” Yalu Rivers; people have been making their mark on the river for several millennia (302). 240. Carter J. Eckert et al., Korea Old and New, 345. 241. Park Chung Hee (1917–1979) also is known as Pak Chnghi. In 1960, only 28.3 percent of the Korean population lived in cities with a population greater than 50,000; by 1990 the percentage had nearly trebled to 74.3. Dong-Ho Shin, “Economic Growth and Environmental Problems in South Korea,” 236. 242. Conrad Totman, Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan, 169. These changes merely shifted rather than lessened planetary demands. 243. The best-known example of environmental damage from this period Page 488 →is that to coastal areas around Ulsan (southeast Korea) and to the Taehwa River (which runs through Ulsan) caused by discharge of industrial waste. Ulsan became a center of the Korean petrochemical and machinery industries in the 1960s. Dong-Ho Shin, “Economic Growth and Environmental Problems in South Korea,” 241. Other cities reporting pollution illnesses in the 1970s include Pusan, Chinhae, Masan, and Kwangyang. For more on Korea's environmental movements, see Ku Do-Wan, Kankoku kanky und no shakaigaku; Su-Hoon Lee, “Environmental Movements in South Korea.” 244. Su-Hoon Lee, “Environmental Movements in South Korea,” 90. 245. Chun Doo Hwan (1931–) is also known as Chn Duhwan. 246. The Onsan industrial complex, constructed in the early 1970s, is located on Korea's southeastern coast near Ulsan. 247. Dong-Ho Shin gives survey statistics in “Economic Growth and Environmental Problems in South Korea,” 244–45. 248. The Korean writer Ko n's poem “Kkot” (Flowers, 1986), discussed in Chapter 7, provides a literary perspective on this phenomenon. 249. Su-Hoon Lee, “Environmental Movements in South Korea,” 116. The Korean Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM) was established in 1993 as an amalgam of local environmental groups that organized in the late 1980s. This group has called attention to the importance of clean air, water, and soil, as well as waste reduction and antinuclearism. Connecting the environmental movement to democratization, members of the KFEM envision an active citizenry keeping watch over government and big business. See Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity. Another important group has been the Citizens’ Movement for Environmental Justice, founded in 1992. The KFEM and CMEJ have faced substantial challenges in the last few decades. 250. Statistics on current environmental conditions in Korea can be found in the Environment White Pages (Hwangyng paeks), published by Korea's Ministry of Environment (Hwangyngbu). See also Hwangyngbu, 2009 Hwangyng t’onggye ynkam. 251. Lee Myung Bak (1941–) is also known as Yi Myngbak. Some of the projects he instituted include a more comprehensive recycling program, the creation of the 286-acre Seoul Forest Park (2005), and the restoration of Ch’nggyech’n (2005), a stream in the middle of the city that was an open sewer after the Korean War, was covered with concrete in the 1950s, and now is popular with both ducks and tourists. See Bryan Walsh, “Saving Seoul.” The Ch’nggyech’n River Project recently won the Harvard University

Graduate School of Design's 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design for its contributions to the quality of urban life and the future of humane urban environments. The prize citation noted that the project represents a “sea change in Asian attitudes toward city design…to a more qualitative program that incorporates quality of life and environmental sustainability into economic development strategies.” Joan Busquets, “The Cheonggyecheon River Project in Seoul, Korea.” 252. Edward B. Barbier, “Toward a Global Green Recovery: The G20 and the Asia-Pacific Region.” China was third, with 33 percent. China enjoys the world's largest total green stimulus spending. 253. See Choe Sang-hun, “Doubts Raised on Ambitious Korean Rivers Project.” Page 489 →Another ecoambiguous endeavor is the New Songdo City project being built by Gale International on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off Incheon. South Korea's answer to Shanghai and Dubai, Songdo is designated as a “green” city, with 40 percent of its acreage “green,” including a hundred-acre park at the center. This supposedly will be one of the planet's cleanest urban areas. But environmentalists have decried what it has done to neighboring tidal flats. David McNeill, “Gravity Defying.” 254. The Korean sociologist Lee Hongkyun notes this paradox in “Environmental Awareness and Environmental Practice in Korea,” 178. Cited in Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Exquisite Corpses of Nature and History.” Andrew Szasz speaks more generally of this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety, where he notes the difference between those interested in their own health and that of the planet. Giving the example of bottled water he comments, “clean consumption [clean water] is compatible with, even requires, dirty production [plastic bottles, etc.]. It is an amazing contradiction” (197). 255. This paragraph is based on Peter Hayes, “Enduring Legacies” and “Unbearable Legacies.” See also Peter Hayes, “Extended Nuclear Deterrence” and “The Path Not Taken.” 256. The DMZ was created under the 1953 armistice agreement that halted the Korean War. 257. Kwi-Gon Kim and Dong-Gil Cho, “Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea's Demilitarized Zone,” 3. Similarly, Cuba's ecosystems are said to have benefited considerably from American embargoes and the collapse of the Soviet Union. 258. Seung-ho Lee, “A New Paradigm for Trust-Building.” 259. Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Exquisite Corpses of Nature and History.” See also Alan Weisman, The World without Us, 183–90. 260. Kim Yngha (1968–) spent time near the DMZ thanks to his father, who was a military officer. Michael Standaert, “Korean Author Speaks at US Writing Program.” For more on defoliants in the DMZ see Lee SiWoo, Life on the Edge of the DMZ, 49–50, 210–12. As Lee notes, areas of the DMZ that should have trees dating at least to the 1950s are treeless because of the defoliant gramoxone. In addition, the area's fortifications prevent animal migrations such as those described in David S. Wilcove, No Way Home. Exposing the paradoxical condition of animals in the DMZ are creative works such as “Nae sarang DMZ” (My Love, DMZ), performed in cities around the world in 2010 by the Korean theater group Mokhwa to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. This play features a group of animals who fear that their paradise will be destroyed if land mines are removed and the DMZ is developed. The ironies of the DMZ mirror those of other environmentally devastated sites, including the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and, to a much lesser extent, Okunoshima Island, Japan, which was a base for Japan's lethal gas production in the 1930s and early 1940s but now is a rabbit paradise. See Steve Featherstone, “Life in the Zone”; “Imperial Army's Poison Gas.” The Japanese-American novelist and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki (1956–) describes similar spaces in her novel My Year of Meats (1998), an exposé of the American beef industry: “These sites [of former nuclear testing and development] are hazardous…Paradoxically, they Page 490 →have conserved these desolate parts of the country. Often these landscapes hide underground bunkers, but on the surface they are rich with flora and fauna that have flourished, protected from families with fat-tired recreational vehicles, grazing cattle, and other ruminants” (247).

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Index 1Q84. See Murakami Haruki “21 seiki ni wa.” See Sakaki Nanao 6·25 ttae, 336 2007. See Robyn Williams Abé Kb (1924-93), 564n80, 565nn82–89 passim; “Dendrocacalia” (“Dendorokakariya,” 1952), 553n113, 565nn80, 82; Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1964), 564n80; Inter Ice Age 4 (Daiyon kanpyki, 1959), 70, 565n80; and Manchuria, 564n80, 565n82; On the Sign at the End of the Road (Owarishi michi no shirube ni, 1948), 564n80; Ruined Map (Moetsukita chizu, 1967), 564n80; Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1962), 30, 411–12, 564n80 Abé Shinz (1954-), 341, 554n26; “beautiful country, Japan” (“utsukushii kuni, Nihon”), 554n26; and Fukuda Yasuo, 554n26 Abji wa adl. See Han Sngwn aboriginal languages. See indigenous languages aboriginal peoples. See indigenous peoples “The Aborigines.” See Wu Junxian Accident: A Day's News. See Christa Wolf Accounts of a Chirping Place. See Chen Huang A Cheng (pen name of Zhong Acheng, 1949-), 470n109, 511n119; King of Chess (Qi wang, 1989), 511n119; King of Children (Haizi wang, 1985), 511n119; King of Trees (Shu wang, 1985), 27, 51, 109, 113, 146–54, 221, 310, 512nn124, 128, 132, 513nn134, 137; Romances of the Landscape (Biandi fengliu, 1985), 511n119; “Turnover” (“Zhouzhuan,” 1988), 347, 351–56; Master of the Mountain (Yama no nushi), 154 “Ach’im.” See Yi Sang acid rain, 20, 39, 59, 76, 442n23, 459n3 Adamu no sue. See Komatsu Saky Adaw Palaf (1949-), 507n88 “Additional Note on My Confinement.” See Yosano Akiko Adios to the Brushlands. See Arturo Longoria Adventures into Back Mountains. See Liu Kexiang Aesop, “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” 61 afforestation, 37, 38, 64, 245, 463n33, 464n45 Afghanistan, 18, 41

Africa, 166, 443n26, 444n31, 448n55, 476n156, 531n21; Chinese in, 41, 465n58; European expansion into, 8; intellectuals, 18; in literature, 243–44, 345, 370, 394, 565n80; and Japan, 478n171, 567n120; and literature, 3, 5, 17, 18, 440n13, 452n73, 509n105, 557n72, 561n22 Aftertime. See Olaf Klein Agano ni ikiru. See Sat Makoto Agano no kioku. See Sat Makoto Agano River, 58, 73 Agent Orange, 492n286, 522n53 agrochemicals, 33, 99–102, 157–61, 169, 173, 184, 233, 365, 529n125, 535n52 Page 646 → Ahmad, Jall l (1923-69), A Stone on a Grave (Sang bar gr, 1964), 537n73 Aichi World Exposition 2005, 477n168 Ainu, 66, 71, 225, 363–64, 399–402, 529n125, 533n33, 563nn46, 55. See also indigenous peoples Ajia no koji. See Wu Zhuoliu “Ajia” no nagisa de: Nikkan shijin no taiwa. See Yoshimasu Gz Ajia ygaku, 484n228 “Akagaeru.” See Asakura Kikuo Akihito (Heisei Emperor, 1933-; r. 1989-), 59 Akutagawa Prize, 562n31 “All's Right with the World.” See Sakaki Nanao All Roads to Lhasa. See Wang Ping All that Happens on the Earth. See Wei An Alone in Two Billion Light Years. See Tanikawa Shuntar “Altitude 10,700 m.” See Sakaki Nanao Amano Reiko (1953-), 483n223; Mansa and the Nagara River: A Man Who Lived on the “Last River” (Mansa to Nagaragawa: “Saigo no kawa” ni ikita otoko, 1990), 71 ambiguity. See ecoambiguity “Ame.” See Hoshi Shin’ichi Amerika Walden shisaku no tabi. See A Meditative Journey to America's Walden Ammons, Archie Randolph (1926-2001), Garbage (1993), 543n10 “Ancestors of the Japanese,” 359

Ancient Capital. See Kawabata Yasunari Andguraundo. See Murakami Haruki An Dohyn (1962-), 491n282 And Sheki (1703-62), 55, 473n135 Anh c, “The Dream of the Bird Garden Guardian; Mr. Fourth's Dream” (“Giâc mo ông lão vuòn chim,” 1965), 521n53 animal consciousness, 429, 437n2, 556n42 animal extinction. See under population—decreasing animal Animal Farm. See George Orwell animal rights, 499n8 Animal's People. See Indra Sinha animal studies, 456n97 anime, and environment, 73, 485n229, 487nn236–38, 552n102 “Anlexiang de yi ri.” See Bai Xianyong An Lushan rebellion, 63 Anmyn Island, 75 “Another Clock.” See Kurihara Sadako Anpo demo. See U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty protests “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” See Aesop Anungazuk, Herbert O. (1945-2010), “An Unwritten Law of the Sea,” 505n57 Aochi Shin (1909-84), 492n284 Aomori, 410 “Aozora.” See Komatsu Saky apocalypse, environmental, 204, 296, 425, 487n236; nuclear 3; planetary, 433, 435, 514n5, 542n142 “April's Roadside Trees.” See Kim Kwanggyu Arahata Kanson (1887-1981), History of the Collapse of Yanaka Village (Yanakamura metsubshi, 1902), 68, 482n202 Arasuka monogatari. See Nitta Jir Aravindkan, Ke, Bhpl (2009), 530n4 Arctic. See Nitta Jir, Tale of Alaska

Arechi. See Wasteland movement Arishima Takeo (1878-1923), 481n197, 565n82; Descendants of Cain (Kain no matsuei, 1917), 65 Ariyoshi Sawako (1931-84), 483n215; Compound Pollution (Fukug osen, 1975), 68–69 Arjuna (Chiky shjo Arjuna). See Kawamori Shji The Army's Last Soldier: Based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. See Kamr Lla Zkira arsenic poison, 475n152, 507n81 art, importance of commercial appeal, 440n11. See also story, power of Page 647 → Aru machi no takai entotsu. See Nitta Jir Aru otoko sono ane no shi. See Shiga Naoya Asakura Kikuo (pen name: Shimaki Kensaku, 1903-45), “Centipede” (“Mukade,” 1946), 534n34; “Red Frog” (“Akagaeru,” 1946), 533n34 Ashio copper mine pollution (1880s), 55–56, 66–68, 108, 321, 482n202 Ashio Green Growing Association (Ashio ni Midori o Sodateru Kai, 1995), 56 ASLE. See Association for the Study of Literature & Environment ASLE-Japan (Association for the Study of Literature & Environment [in Japan]; Bungaku Kanky Gakkai), 484n228, 485nn233–34, 493n289 ASLE-Korea (Association for the Study of Literature & Environment [in Korea]), 485n234, 493n289 ASLE-Taiwan (Association for the Study of Literature & Environment [in Taiwan]), 497n332 Association for the Study of Literature & Environment (ASLE), 53, 451n70, 452n72, 471n119, 484n228, 485nn233–34 Association of East Asian Environmental History, 486n234 “At Kinosaki.” See Shiga Naoya atomic bombings, 57, 60, 67, 94, 203, 211, 317, 340–41, 370, 510n118, 526n101, 544n12, 554nn24, 27; and Komatsu Saky, 70; and Koreans, 109; and e Kenzabur, 476n161 atomic bomb literature, 68, 203, 335, 341, 482n206, 510n118, 527n112, 554n27 Atomic Bomb Poetry: Collection of Poems by 181 People. See Nagatsu Kzabur “At Ppsngp’o.” See Ko n Atsugi base, 59 attitudes. See under environment—human attitudes Atwood, Margaret (1939-), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), 537n72

“Auguries of Innocence.” See William Blake Aum Shinriky, 562n31 Australia, aboriginal literature, 404, 563n60; aboriginal peoples, 7, 126, 443n26, 505n67; environmental degradation, 7, 443n26; European expansion into, 8; and literature, 3, 17, 22, 369–70, 404, 423, 478n171, 561n22 “Autumn Night.” See Lu Xun avalanche, 18, 137, 260, 401, 541n123 avant-garde, in China, 50, 545n28; in Japan, 411, 564n80, 565n84; in Taiwan, 179, 520n40 “Ba ba ba.” See Han Shaogong Backed Against the Sea. See Wang Wenxing Bai Chongxi (1893-1966), 553n1 Bai Jiahua, 497n330 Bai Juyi (772-846), 46, 466n68 Bai Ling (pen name of Zhuang Zuhuang, 1951-), “Hearing the Claim That the Comfort Women Were Volunteers” (“Wen weianfu ziyuan shuo,” 2001), 228–29, 534n43; Taiwan Poetics Quarterly, 534n43 Bai Qiu (pen name of He Jinrong, 1937-), 93, 498n334, 541n135; “Trees” (“Shu,” 1971), 270–74 Bai Xianyong (Kenneth Pai, 1937-), 93, 553n1; “Chicago Death” (“Zhejiage [Chicago] zhi si,” 1964), 553n1; “A Day in Pleasantville” (“Anlexiang de yi ri,” 1964), 29, 328–37, 375, 553n2; Modern Literature (Xiandai wenxue), 553n1; New Yorkers (Niuyue ke, 1974), 553n1; Taipei People (Taibeiren, 1971), 553n1 “Ballad of the Ancient Cypress.” See Du Fu Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. See Dai Sijie Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise. See Dai Sijie Bamboo Hat (Li), 542n135 Bannen. See Dazai Osamu banner (qi), 549n75 Page 648 → “Bao.” See Xin Yu Bao Mi. See Wang Lixiong “Bare Tree.” See Kim Ch’unsu “Bare Tree and Poetry.” See Kim Ch’unsu Bear Cult, 533n33 Bear Festival, 533n33

“Bears of Mount Nametoko.” See Miyazawa Kenji Beat poets, 453n74. See also individual poets “beautiful country, Japan” (“utsukushii kuni, Nihon”). See Abé Shinz “Beautiful Small World.” See Liu Kexiang Beavan, Colin, No Impact Man (2009), 536n71 bee. See honeybee behaviors. See under environment—human behaviors Beifang de he. See Zhang Chengzhi Beihai de ren. See Wang Wenxing Bell of Poesy. See Zhang Yingchang “Below the Water That's above the Water.” See Ch’oe Sngho Benét, Stephen Vincent (1898-1943), “Metropolitan Nightmare” (1933), 342, 554n28 Berji Kristin. See Latife Tekin Berry, Wendell (1934-), 454n88; Standing by Words (1983), 454n88; The Unsettling of America (1977), 454n88 Besshi mine, 56, 68 Beyond the Gate: China in Flux after the Three Gorges Dam. See Wang Ping Bhabha, Homi, 445n39 Bhpl. See Kamr Lla Zkira; Ke Aravindkan; Robert Nichols; Rahul Varma Bhopal. See Rahul Varma Bhopal, Union Carbide disaster (1984), 215, 530n4 Bhopal and literature. See Mahasweta Devi; Kamr Lla Zkira; Ke Aravindkan; Robert Nichols; Indra Sinha; Rahul Varma “Bian.” See Zheng Qingwen “Biancheng.” See Shen Congwen Biandi fengliu. See A Cheng Bichsel, Peter (1935-), 514n4 Bihai jiyou. See Yu Yonghe Bing Xin (1900-1999), 519n37, 536n65 biocentrism, 448n56. See also Aldo Leopold biodiversity, 13, 38, 40, 43, 59–60, 75–76, 85, 87, 444n31, 464n45. See also Northeast Asian Biodiversity

Corridor; United Nations Decade of Biodiversity Biodiversity Decade. See United Nations Decade of Biodiversity biophilia, 9, 444n35. See also ecophilia, nature-“love” of bioregionalism, 449n62 Bird, Bird, Blue Bird. See Song Sugwn birds as companions, 561n27 Bi tiankong geng guangkuo. See Zhao Xinshan Bitterness of Life. See Shiroyama Sabur Black Rain. See Ibuse Masuji Blair, Eric Arthur. See George Orwell Blake, William (1757-1827), “Auguries of Innocence” (1803), 223, 297, 413, 531n25; and Buddhism, 531n25; and Daoism, 532n25 Blood Red Sunset. See Ma Bo Blue Ridge Mountains, 439n6 “Blue Sky.” See Komatsu Saky Blue Star Poetry Society (Lanxing Shihui), 519n35 Bly, Robert (1926-), 543n3 bodyscape, denotation, 437n2 Böll, Heinrich (1917-85), 514n4 “Book of Emperor Tongmyng.” See Yi Kyubo “Border Town.” See Shen Congwen Bradbury, Ray (1920-), 542n139 “Braids.” See Zheng Qingwen British Petroleum disaster, viii, 133 Broader than the Sky. See Zhao Xinshan “The Brothers Shu.” See Su Tong Browning, Robert (1812-89), Pippa Passes (1841), 342, 555n29 Brunner, John (1934-95), Stand on Zanzibar (1968), 240 Buddhism, 18, 36, 42, 277, 392, 423, 461n15, 532n25, 545n27, 553n1. See also Chan (Zen) Page 649 →

“Buffalo Hide Bags.” See Ch’oe Sngho “Bulldozer.” See Pm Taesun “Bulldozer.” See Yi Sngbu “Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy Vines.” See Ch’oe Sngho Bungaku to kanky. See Literature and Environment Burma. See Myanmar “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather.” See Gao Xingjian Buzoku (The Tribe), 72 Caiyou riji. See Wang Bing Cai Zhizhong (1948-), The Music of Nature: Zhuangzi Speaks (Ziran de xiaosheng: Zhuangzi shuo, 1987), 468n74 Call of the Wild. See Jack London Call to Arms. See Lu Xun “Camaleonte.” See Daria Menicanti “Canbao.” See Zheng Chouyu “Cangying.” See Zhou Zuoren Cao Baohua (1906-78), 544n16. See also Chen Jingrong Capote, Truman (1924-84), 562n31 Carson, Rachel (1907-64), The Edge of the Sea (1955), 446n43; The Sea around Us (1951), 446n43; Silent Spring (1962), 10, 51, 53, 59, 68, 71–72, 81–86 passim, 359, 446n43, 447n53, 482n210, 484n228, 493n288; Under the Sea Wind (1941), 446n43 Carver, Raymond (1938-88), 562n31 Cather, Willa (1837-1947), My Ántonia (1918), 292 “Cemetery.” See Mun Tksu “Centipede.” See Asakura Kikuo ceramics, 473n137 “Certain Sorrow.” See Chng Hynjong “Ch’aesikchuija.” See Han Kang “Chameleon.” See Daria Menicanti “Ch’amsaedl n dis chungnn ga.” See Ch’oe Sngho Chan (Zen) Buddhism, 531n25 Chang Chunhwan (1970-), Save the Planet! (Chigu rl chik’yra, 2003), 492n286

Changjiang! Changjiang! See Dai Qing Chang Skju (1954-), 491n282 “Chayn.” See Hwang Sunwn “Chayn.” See Yi Sngbu “Chayn kwa Rousseau.” See Sin Skchng Chekov, Anton (1860-1904), 510n109 Cheng Baoyi. See François Cheng Cheng, François (Cheng Baoyi, 1929-), 530n5 Chen Guanxue (1934-). See Koarnhak Tarn Chen Huang (pen name of Chen Huihuang, 1954-), 93, 495n305, 498n334, 540nn108, 112; Accounts of a Chirping Place (Zhoujiu dizhi, 1989), 540n108; Of Birds and Men (Renniao zhi jian, 1988), 540n108; “Pigeon Tuoli, Part 1” (“Gezi Tuoli zhi yi,” 1990), 254–56; Pigeon Tuoli Is the Only Hope (Gezi Tuoli shi weiyi xiwang, 1994), 245, 252, 254–56, 391. See also Cao Baohua Chen Huihuang. See Chen Huang Chen Jingrong (1917-89), 29, 459n114, 544n16; “Beijing City” (“Beijing cheng,” 1981), 548n65; “City Scene at Dusk” (“Dushi huanghun jijing,” 1946), 49, 292–96; “Process” (“Guocheng,” 1946), 544n16; Translation (Yiwen), 544n16 Chen Kaige (1952-), King of the Children (Haizi wang, 1988), 472n128; Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), 472n128 “Chenlun de guotu.” See Xu Gang Chen Yingsong (1956-), 470n109 Chen Yufeng (1953-), 495n305 Chernobyl, 211, 314, 341, 485n231, 487n238, 489n260, 527n101, 550n77 Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), 92 “Chicago Death.” See Bai Xianyong Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, 1, 437n1 “Chicken.” See Shang Qin Chigu rl chik’yra. See Chang Chunhwan childfree, 537n73 China: in South America, 41; environmental degradation (see under environment—degradation in China) Page 650 → China Tidal Wave. See Wang Lixiong

Chinese Civil War (1927-49), 469n92, 544n18 Chinese Exclusion Act, 559n95 Chinese-language poems by Japanese. See kanshi Chinese Nationalist Party. See Guomindang Chinggis Khan (ca. 1162-1227), 549n67 Chinhk so rl t’ago. See Ch’oe Sngho Chisso (Nihon Chisso Hiry Kabushiki Kaisha), 57–58, 68, 108–25 passim, 319–22, 475n155, 483n214, 502nn28, 40, 503n49, 551nn88, 90–91, 93; overseas plants, 501n17, 552n93 Chisso Was I. See Ogata Masato Chisso wa watashi de atta. See Ogata Masato Ch’oe Sngho (1954-), 28, 82, 237, 459n113, 491n282, 526n99, 543n10; “Below the Water That's above the Water” (“Mul wi e mul arae,” 1983), 29, 277, 287–91, 299, 305–6; “Buffalo Hide Bags” (“Mulso kajuk kabang,” 2005), 359–61; “Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy Vines” (“Tamjaengi tnggul e hwipssain puldoj,” 2000), 203; Gobi (Kobi, 2007), 526n99; “Industrial Zone” (“Kongjang chidae,” 2005), 538n82; “In the Refrigerated City” (“Naenggak doen tosi e s,” 1991), 328, 335–40, 360, 554n21; “Logging” (“Plmok,” 1983), 511n123; Riding a Mud Ox (Chinhk so rl t’ago, 1987), 526n99; “Sad Sow” (“Slp’n twaeji,” 1993), 274–76; “Shrimp Eyes” (“Saeu i nun,” 1993), 215; “Where Do Sparrows Die?” (“Ch’amsaedl n dis chungnn ga,” 1993), 232–33, 236 Ch’oe Sngja (1952-), 29, 82, 459n115, 491n282, 537n77; “Rhapsody of Yido” (“Yido kwangsigok,” 1984), 359, 366–68; “Went to the Sea in Winter” (“Kyul e pada e kasstta,” 1984), 241–46 Cho Kyngnan (1969-), Tongue (Hy, 2007), 491n283 Chomsky, Noam (1928-), 492n284 Chng Chaewan (1936-), 491n282 Chng Ch’an (1953-), 491n282 Chng Chin-gyu (1939-), 491n282 “Chong de shijie: zhameng de huaxiang.” See Rongzi Ch’nggyech’n River Project, 488n251 Chng Hynjong (1939-), 28, 82, 191, 459n112, 491n282, 517n23; “Certain Sorrow” (“Musn slp’m i,” 1992), 517n25; “Death God of Civilization” (“Munmyng i sasin,” 1991), 300, 302–4; “Deep Soil” (“Kip’n hlk,” 1992), 359, 361–63; Dreams of Things (Samul i kkum, 1972), 517n23; Festival of Suffering (Kot’ong i ch’ukche, 1974), 517n23; “The Field is Forlorn” (“Tlp’an i chngmak hada,” 1992), 170, 172–76; I Am Uncle Star (Na nn pyl ajssi, 1978), 517n23; Like a Ball that Bounces When It Falls (Ttrjydo t’wi nn kong ch’rm, 1984), 517n23; “Like a Ghost” (“Kwisin ch’rm,” 1989), 185–87, 190; “Poetry Writing Classroom” (“Sich’angjak kyosil,” 1995), 512n123; “Protective Embrace” (“P’um,” 1989), 170–72; A Single Flower (Han kkot song i, 1992), 517n23; There Isn't Much Time for Love (Saranghal sigan i manch’i ant’a, 1989), 517n23; Trees of the World (Sesang i namudl, 1995), 517n23; “What's That?” (“Kge mwni,” 1995), 215, 530n4 Chng Inhwa, 491n282 Chn Sngt’ae (1969-), “Wolves” (“Nkdae,” 2006), 471n125 Cho Sehi (1942-), 29, 83, 459n114, 491n284, 546n37; “City of Machines” (“Kigye tosi,” 1977), 300, 304–310,

Chotti Munda & His Arrow. See Mahasweta Devi Chuang shiji. See Xin Yu Chbetsu River, 100 Chuci. See Qu Yuan “Chug kann kang.” See Cho Sehi “Chgoku yuki no sur bto.” See Murakami Haruki Chumong. See Emperor Tongmyng “Chmon no i ryriten.” See Miyazawa Kenji Chun Doo Hwan (Chn Duhwan, 1931-), 75, 186, 488n245 “Chun wang.” See Du Fu Cien años de soledad. See Gabriel García Márquez Circumpolar Bear Cult. See Bear Cult Citizens’ Movement for Environmental Justice, 84, 488n249 “City of Machines.” See Cho Sehi “City Scene at Dusk.” See Chen Jingrong civilization, and environmental degradation, 87, 122, 190, 276, 277, 288–90, 300–304, 335, 357–79, 509n105, 523n66, 526n99, 546n36, 557n70 Clark, John Pepper (1935-), 450n68 class enemy (jieji diren), 550n81 Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing), 205 Classic of Poetry (Shijing, 600 B.C.E.), 41–43, 466n63, 467n72 climate change, 3, 8, 14, 33, 41, 51, 70–73, 76, 83, 94, 208, 260, 442n22, 446n49, 447n53, 477n169, 508n93, 524n72, 554n28 Cloud and Rose. See Kim Ch’unsu Coal Money. See Wang Bing Coetzee, J. M., Disgrace (1999), 561n22; The Lives of Animals (1999, 2001); Japanese translation Dbutsu no inochi (2003), 482n210 Coke, Allison Adelle Hedge (1958-), “Tractor” (2006), 558n75 Collection of Atomic Bomb Poems—August. See Sakai Izumi Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’ysh, eighth c.), 61–63, 407–8, 523n64, 525n84 “Colloquy of the Centaurs.” See Rubén Darío

colonialism, 104; Japanese in Korea (1910-45), 74–79 passim; Japanese in Taiwan (1895-1945), 85, 89–90 “Coloquio de los centauros.” See Rubén Darío comfort women, 229–31, 534n45 comparative literature, 6, 17, 22, 24–25, 30, 435 comparative slavery, 23, 25, 434, 457n105 Complete Collection of World Literature, Kawade Shob (Sekai bungaku zensh, 2007), 69 Complete Works of Kim Chiha. See Kim Chiha Complete Works of Nitta Jir. See Nitta Jir Compound Pollution. See Ariyoshi Sawako conceptual networks, 16–17, 23, 30, 33, 94–95, 278, 433–34 conferences, literature and environment, 451n70, 472n127, 485–86n234, 493n289, 497n332, 545n28 Confucianism, 18, 36, 77, 461n14, 463n35, 466n65, 481n195 Cong Weixi (1933-), 470n109 Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), The Heart of Darkness (1902), 509n105 “Conscience.” See Mun Tksu consciousness. See animal consciousness; environmental consciousness; planetary consciousness conservation, 9, 37–38, 58, 70, 75, 85, 103, 132–33, 145, 176, 217, 286, 389, 393, 447n50, 450n65, 460n8, 464nn45–46, 474nn149–50, 476n165, 477n169, 483n217; in Africa, 531n21, 536n71; and indigenous peoples, 509n105; and whaling, 478n171. See also sustainable use contact space, 22, 362, 455n91, 456n93, 486n234. See also nebula “Con thú ln nht.” See Nguyn Huy Thip Page 652 → Conversations with the Dalai Lama. See Wang Lixiong Cook, Frederick, 559n102 coral reefs, 555n35 cosmopolitanism. See ecocosmopolitanism “Cosmos Flower.” See Isakawa Masaomi The Cove (2009), 478n17 cow, and earthquakes, 534n48; smuggling, 507n80 “Coyote.” See It Hiromi “Cranes.” See Hwang Sunwn

“Crazy Iris.” See Ibuse Masuji Crisis of the Source of Life. See Liu Guixian Crude Oil. See Wang Bing “Cry of the People.” See Kim Chiha Cultural Revolution (1966-76), 38, 50–51, 146–48, 152–54, 205, 218, 221–24, 252, 310–11, 315, 351, 425, 469nn97, 100, 472n128, 501n19, 511n119, 545n28, 547n58, 548n66. See also rustication “Cursing the Sparrow.” See Guo Moruo “Curupira: Guardian Spirit of the Forest,” 567n120 “The Cutting of the Forest.” See Leo Tolstoy cyborg, 438n2 Dadi shang de shiqing. See Wei An Dai Qing (1941-), 52–53; Hongse jingbao (1987), 471n118; The River Dragon Has Come! (Shuilong lai le! 1997), 53; Yangzi! Yangzi! (Changjiang! Changjiang! 1989), 53 Daisetsuzan National Park, 70, 421, 566n118 Dai Sijie (1954-), 217, 530n5; Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise, 2000, 2001), 472n128, 530n5 Daiyon kanpyki. See Abé Kb Dalai Lama, 559n93 Damo langhai. See Guo Xuebo dams, x, 3, 7, 11, 12, 64, 71, 204, 437n2, 515n8, 550n76, 558n80; Arase Dam, 198; and China, 36, 38, 41, 109, 223, 374, 464n43, 465n54, 472n128, 528n113, 530n6; Ichifusa Dam, 197–98; and Japan, 71, 99, 100–101, 104, 197–98, 206, 499n8, 525n83, 527n103, 529n125; Kawabegawa Dam, 198; and Korea, 80, 109, 487n239; Nagara River dam, 419–20; Supung Dam, 487n239; Three Gorges Dam, 39–40, 52–53, 205–8, 220–23, 473n128, 527n105; Yanba Dam, 104, 499n8 Daneshvar, Simin (1931-), A Persian Requiem: A Novel by Simin Daneshvar (Savushun, 1969), 502n35; “Sutra,” 117, 502n35 Danshui River, 87, 251–52 Dao de jing, 219 Daoism, 18, 42, 217, 461n11, 461n14, 545n27 Darío, Rubén (1867-1916), “Colloquy of the Centaurs” (“Coloquio de los centauros,” 1896),449n58 “Dawn Sea.” See Mun Tksu Day, Lucille Lang (1947-), “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule,” 380, 560n2 The Day after Tomorrow (2004), 567n120

“A Day in Pleasantville.” See Bai Xianyong The Day of the Triffids (1962), 567n120 “The Day Small Birds Disappeared from the Skies.” See Tanikawa Shuntar The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, 2008), 422 Dazai Osamu (1909-48), 30, 459n116, 564n67; cult of Dazai, 563n67; Final Years (Bannen, 1936), 564n67; No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku, 1948), 564n67; relationship with hometown, 564n67; Setting Sun (Shay, 1947), 564n67; Tsugaru (1944), 67, 407, 564nn68, 73 DDT, 59, 76, 442n23 “Death God of Civilization.” See Chng Hynjong Death March on Mount Hakkda. See Nitta Jir Page 653 → The Death of a Certain Man's Sister. See Shiga Naoya “A Death of Green.” See Douglas Livingstone Decade of Biodiversity. See United Nations Decade of Biodiversity Decay of the Angel. See Mishima Yukio “Declaration.” See Sakaki Nanao declining population (shshika). See under population—decreasing human—Japan deep ecology, 106–7, 454n87, 471n118, 500n13 “Deep Soil.” See Chng Hynjong deforestation, 3, 7–11, 14, 33, 442n24, 446n49, 448n55, 459n4, 558n80; China, 20, 35–38, 42–44, 46, 51, 461nn14, 15, 462nn17, 20, 23, 463n33, 466n60; in literature, 147–54, 182, 217, 220, 236, 253, 255, 260, 410, 473n128; in Thoreau's Walden, 162; Japan, 1–2, 55–57, 67, 71, 473n137; Korea, 55, 76, 79; Pakistan, 442n24; Russia, 522n53; Taiwan, 85–86, 493n294, 494n299 Defunct Capital. See Jia Pingwa degradation. See under environment—degradation Delamu. See Tian Zhuangzhuang DeLillo, Don (1936-), Underworld (1997), 557n62; White Noise (1984), 5, 441n15 “Delivery Room Story.” See Yosano Akiko “Demilitarized Zone.” See Yu Hynjong Demilitarized Zone (DMZ, 1953-), frontispiece, 76–77, 80–81, 94, 249, 261, 265–70, 489nn256, 260, 491n277, 541nn128, 133 Democracy Moving Forward: China's Third Road. See Wang Lixiong Den’en no yutsu. See Sat Haruo

Deng Xiaoping (1904-97), 39, 369, 425, 559n94 Descendants of Adam. See Komatsu Saky Descendants of Cain. See Arishima Takeo Descendants of the Mist. See Nitta Jir deserts, East Asia, 20, 36, 37, 40, 51, 147, 311–18, 411–17, 459n4, 461n14, 464n45, 471n125, 526n99, 548n65, 565n82 Desert Wolf. See Guo Xuebo developmental state, 501n19 Devi, Mahasweta (1926-), Chotti Munda & His Arrow (2003), 458n106; “The Hunt,” 510n108; Imaginary Maps (1995), 458n106; Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (eroykaikala, praa Sahaa o pirath, 1989), 161 Diamond Mountains (Kmgangsan), 82 Dictionary of Maqiao. See Han Shaogong Diet, Japanese, 58, 114, 321–22, 475n155, 554n26 Diet Building, protesters, 325, 552n106 Dijin minzhu: Zhongguo de disantiao daolu. See Wang Lixiong Dillard, Annie (1945-), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), 2, 439n5 Diné Hataalii Association, 380 Diqiu zai kuqi. See Zhao Xinshan disaster, natural, 7, 40, 442n24, 524n72, 550n78 Disgrace. See J. M. Coetzee Dissolving Power: A Multistaged Electoral System. See Wang Lixiong Distant Thunder. See Tatematsu Wahei DMZ. See Demilitarized Zone Dbutsu no inochi. See J. M. Coetzee dog meat, 563n61 “Dokushinby.” See Masuda Mizuko Dongting Lake, 221 Dragon Beard Ditch. See Lao She Dragon King, Palace of, 113 “Dreaming Beast.” See Yi Ch’angdong Dream Island. See Hino Keiz

“Dream of a Winter Night.” See Kim Ch’unsu “The Dream of the Bird Garden Guardian; Mr. Fourth's Dream.” See Anh c Dreams of Things. See Chng Hynjong Page 654 → Drifting. See Wang Lixiong “The Drowning of an Old Cat.” See Huang Chunming Du Fu (712-70), 64, 466n68, 467n74, 480n193; “Ballad of the Ancient Cypress” (“Gu bo xing”), 45; “Spring View” (“Chun wang”), 63–64, 184, 524n70 Du Hong (1964-), 495n305 Duke Mu of Shan, 36 Duke of Zhou, 37 Du Mu (803-53), 466n68 “Dushi huanghun jijing.” See Chen Jingrong Dussel, Enrique (1934-), The Invention of the Americas (1995), 24 Du Xinzi, 485n305 A Dying River. See Shen Rong “A Dying River.” See Cho Sehi Dylan, Bob (1941-), “Every Grain of Sand” (1981), 532n25 The Earth. See Nagatsuka Takashi Earth Abides. See George R. Stewart Earth Day, 520n37 Earth Gate. See Jia Pingwa Earth is Sobbing. See Zhao Xinshan Earth Maiden Arjuna. See Kawamori Shji earthquakes, 18; Hanshin (Japan, 1995), 209–10; in China, 40, 220, 230; in Japan, 479n180, 528n124; in Taiwan, 534n48; Thoku (Japan, 2011), 59–60, 72 Eastern Zhou dynasty (771-221 B.C.E.), 37, 460n7 Ecclesiastes, 156 Echo. See Taguchi Randy ecoambiguity, viii, 4, 18, 28, 30, 94, 434, 445nn37, 39–40, 498n6; attitudes, 93, 103, 136, 148, 154, 340–60 passim, 369–72, 380–96, 412–17; behaviors, 59, 214–78 passim, 312–40 passim, 400–404, 468n79, 478n171,

512n123; characteristics, 3–6, 9–12, 27, 33, 447n52; defined, 1, 17, 442n20, 444n37; in East Asia, 18, 22; information, 28–29, 160–84 passim, 193, 212, 235–38, 271, 300, 305, 372–96, 405, 421; in individuals/groups, 27; and literature, 13–14, 21–22, 31. See also environment ecocosmopolitanism, 14–15, 21, 23, 26, 72, 191, 204, 213, 222, 301, 448n58, 452n72; and atomic bomb literature, 340–41; in literature, 30, 154, 156, 165–72 passim, 184, 187, 195, 241, 245, 284–94 passim, 418, 471n118, 504nn50, 51, 517n23, 519n33, 525n79; and Ishimure Michiko, 108, 118–19; and Miyazawa Kenji, 532n31; and Sakaki Nanao, 342–47 ecocriticism, 6, 9, 18, 30, 282, 328, 435, 510n107; characteristics, 451n69, 452n72, 456n97; in East Asia, 73, 451n70, 472n127, 482n206, 484n228, 486n234, 497n332, 565n81; in India, 451n70; method, 63, 444n37, 444n58; phases (“first-wave” and “second-wave”), 20–22, 54, 454nn87, 88 Ecocriticism Review (Ekokuriteishizumu reby), 484n228 ecodegradation. See under environment—degradation ecofeminism, 25, 233, 458n108, 482n206, 501n15, 538n77, 539n94, 567n124 ecological life narrative. See life narrative ecological literature (shengtai wenxue), 50–51, 469n103, 472n127, 531n9. See also environmental literature; green literature ecological writing, 35, 469n103 ecomyopia, 8 Eco Park (Minamata), 124 ecophilia, 9–10. See also biophilia; nature-“love of” ecophobia, 9–10, 380, 444n37 ecopropaganda, 59, 477n166 ecosystem, denotations, 437n2 ecotourism, 72, 530n3 Eco Town (Minamata), 124 Ecuador, 41 The Edge of the Sea. See Rachel Carson ee ja nai ka (lit. why not?, anything goes) rebellions, 344 “Ee ja nai ka ee ja nai ka.” See Sakaki Nanao Eich, Günter (1907-72), 514n4 Page 655 → “Eigo, Nihongo, Kanokogo.” See It Hiromi Ekokuriteishizumu Kenkykai. See Society for Ecocriticism Studies Ekokurteishizumu reby. See Ecocriticism Review

“Elegy.” See Hara Tamiki elephants, 37, 384–85, 393–99, 438, 465n58, 478n171, 562n45 “The Elephant's Disappearance.” See Murakami Haruki Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965), 524n70; 543n3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), 84, 484n229, 493n288 Emperor Akihito (Heisei Emperor, 1933-; r. 1989-), 59 Emperor Jomei (593-641; r. 629-41), 62, 480n185 Emperor Tongmyng (Chumong, r. 37-19 B.C.E.), 78 Emperor Yuri (r. 19 B.C.E.-18 C.E.), 77, 490n263 encompassing damage, 14 End Shsaku (1923-96), 492n284 engaged cosmopolitanism, 449n58 “English, Japanese, Fawnese.” See It Hiromi Enrai. See Tatematsu Wahei environment, 437n2; acquiescing to degradation, 281–327 passim; degradation, 2–3, 13–15, 380, 514n8; degradation in China, 35–54, 460–73nn7-128; degradation in East Asia, 18–20, 26–27, 33–34, 94; degradation in Japan, 54–74, 473–87nn129-238; degradation in Korea, 54–55, 74–84, 473n129, 487–93nn239-89; degradation in Taiwan, 84–94, 493–98nn290-334; human attitudes toward, 10, 27, 29–30, 102–55, 388, 397, 402–5, 442n19, 499n7, 501n28, 561n23; human behaviors toward, 10, 28–30, 388, 397–98, 402–5, 417, 442n19, 499n7, 501n28, 534n50, 561n23; illusions and delusions, 328–79; information about, 8, 28, 156–213, 514n8; in history, 7–8, 34; laws, 40; in literature, 17–18, 26–27, 60–66, 433–35, 499n7; remediation, 20, 34–35. See also ecoambiguity environmental actuality, defined, 15 Environment Agency (Kankych, 1971), 58 environmental ambiguity. See ecoambiguity environmental consciousness, 8, 16, 32, 33, 46, 68, 74, 132, 158, 166, 178, 195, 336, 425, 450n65, 460n7, 463n35, 472n127, 487n238, 563n49 environmental education, 39–40, 440n10, 472n127 environmental ethics, 21, 459n2, 460n7 environmental humanities, 435, 440n11 environmentality, 18, 21–22, 453n74, 481n202, 535n60 environmental justice, 21, 25, 83, 84, 108, 128, 310, 458n106, 475n155, 483n215, 488n249, 494n301, 514n4, 527n103 environmental literature (huanjing wenxue), 50–51, 469n103, 470n104, 530n9. See also ecological literature;

green literature environmentally oriented literature, 535n60 environmental movements, 176, 388–89, 418, 439n5; China, 53–54, 465n48; Japan, 58–59; South Korea, 75–76, 84, 488n249; Taiwan, 85–87, 494n301. See also deep ecology; radical environmentalism “Environmental Pollution Diet,” 58 environmental possibility, defined, 15 Environmental Protection Law, 76 environmental superpower, 20 environmental writing, 35, 469n103, 470n104, 493n289 “Environment and Literature.” See Gao Xingjian Environment Ministry (Kankysh, 2001), 58 Environment White Pages. See Ministry of Environment Epic of Gilgamesh (second millennium B.C.E.), 13, 448n55 “Epistemology.” See Richard Wilbur Epoch Poetry Quarterly. See Xin Yu Erasmus, 156 Page 656 → Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen. See Konrad Z. Lorenz Eskimo, 506n70 Essays in Idleness. See Yoshida Kenk Eternity across the Sea. See Tatematsu Wahei Evans, Nicholas (1950-), The Loop (1998), 548n60 “Every Grain of Sand” (1981), 532n25 Evolution and Ethics. See Thomas Huxley “Exposition on Dwelling in the Mountains.” See Xie Lingyun extinction. See population—decreasing animal extratextual, 161–63, 204 Families of Jiwowa Village. See Jia Pingwa Family of Fallen Leaves. See Huy Lien family size. See under population—overpopulation

“Famuzhe, xing lai!” See Xu Gang Fan Chengda (1126-93), 466n68 “Fangsheng.” See Huang Chunming Fan Qinhui (1965-), 495n305 farmstead poetry (tianyuan shi), 42, 466nn65, 68 Father and Son. See Han Sngwn Faulkner, William (1897-1962), Go Down Moses (1942), 292, 544n13 “Fawn Murder.” See It Hiromi Feidu. See Jia Pingwa “Feixing laji.” See Shang Qin “Feixing yanlei.” See Shang Qin “Felines.” See Daria Menicanti “Felini.” See Daria Menicanti Feng niao Pinuocha. See Liu Kexiang Ferber, Edna (1885-1968), 450n68 Festival of Suffering. See Chng Hynjong “The Field is Forlorn.” See Chng Hynjong The Field of Life and Death. See Xiao Hong film, environmental, 21, 54, 70, 73–74, 412, 422, 445n40, 469n96, 472n128, 478n171, 486n235, 492n286, 536n71, 552n102. See also Abé Kb; Colin Beavan; Chang Chunhwan; Chen Kaige; The Cove; Dai Sijie; The Day after Tomorrow; The Day of the Triffids; Frogs; Godzilla; Gundam; The Happening; The Host; Jia Zhangke; Kamanaka Hitomi; Kat Kunio; Komatsu Saky; Lao She; Lü Le; Miyazaki Hayao; Qi Jian; The Ruins; Sat Makoto; Tian Zhuangzhuang; Tsuchimoto Noriaki; Tsutsui Yasutaka; Tulsa The Final Dream that Drenches Us: Collection of Kim Kwanggyu's Poetry. See Kim Kwanggyu Final Years. See Dazai Osamu “First Snow.” See Ko n first-wave ecocriticism, 20–21, 454n88 Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940), 544n13, 562n31; The Great Gatsby (1925), 292 “Five Army Officers and a Coal Miner.” See Shen Congwen Flaming Green Tree. See e Kenzabur flatlanders, 508n91

“Flies.” See Zhou Zuoren Floating Clouds. See Hayashi Fumiko Der Flötenton. See Gabriele Wohmann “Flowers” (1947). See Kim Ch’unsu “Flowers” (1952). See Kim Ch’unsu “Flowers” (1986). See Ko n “Flowers in Cement Country.” See Hwang Tonggyu “Flowers No Longer Flutter in Our City.” See Rongzi “Flying Garbage.” See Shang Qin “Flying Sled.” See Oguma Hideo “Flying Tears.” See Shang Wei The Foliage. See Lü Le The Forest Ranger. See Qi Jian Formosa. See Taiwan Formosa Plastics Corporation, 88, 507n81 “Fortress in Ruins.” See Zheng Chouyu Four Generations under One Roof. See Lao She four olds (sijiu), 147, 152–53 Four Rivers Restoration Project (4RRP), 76 Page 657 → “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig.” See Miyzawa Kenji “Frandon Ngakk no buta.” See Miyazawa Kenji Friends of Nature (Ziran zhi You, 1994), 39, 559n93 Frogs (1972), 567n120 frogs in literature, 534n34, 567n120 “The Fruits of My Woman.” See Han Kang Fujisan. See Taguchi Randy Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943), 89, 496n318 fkei (landscape), 564n73 Fukuda Yasuo (1936-), 554n26. See also Abé Shinz

Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. See under nuclear power—Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns “Funeral Boat without a Mast.” See Cho Sehi Fuzao. See Jia Pingwa Gabon, 41 Gaia, 457n100, 500n12 Gandamu. See Gundam Gang of Four, 545n28 Gao Hua (1954-), 470n109 Gao Xingjian (1940-), 237, 472n126; “Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather” (“Gei wo laoye mai yugan,” 1986), 530n6; “Environment and Literature” (“Kanky to bungaku,” 2010), 532n27; Soul Mountain (Lingshan, 1989), 28, 51, 217, 221–25, 284, 310, 413, 527n104, 530n8, 530n9; Wild Man (Yeren, 1985), 51, 217, 560n2 “Gaoxiong, 1973.” See Yang Mu garbage, 20, 40–41, 59, 71, 88, 192–93, 239, 255, 261–65, 270, 287–91, 306, 351–56, 363–69, 418–19, 424, 446n49, 453n79, 464n44, 476n160, 524n69, 536n66, 543n10, 544n16, 557n62 Garbage. See Archie Randolph Ammons “Gei wo laoye mai yugan.” See Gao Xingjian Genbakushi 181 ninsh. See Nagatsu Kzabur Genbaku shish-hachigatsu. See Sakai Izumi geological inheritance parks, 477n168 Gezi Tuoli shi weiyi xiwang. See Chen Huang “Gezi Tuoli zhi yi.” See Chen Huang Ghosh, Amitav (1956-), The Hungry Tide (2004), 509n105 “Ghosts.” See Kim Kwanggyu “Giâc mo ông lão vuòn chim.” See Anh c Gilgamesh. See Epic of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. See Yusef Komunyakaa Ginsberg, Allen (1926-97), 453n74, 485n230 Ginza, 528n120 The Girl Who Dashes Through Time. See Tsutsui Yasutaka global geoparks, 477n168 globalization, 14, 525n85; environmental, 14; literary, 15

global North, 447n50 global warming. See climate change Gobi. See Ch’oe Sngho Gobi Desert, 20, 40, 516n99, 526n99, 565n82 Go Down Moses. See William Faulkner Godzilla (1954), 567n120 Going to Muni Village. See Ko n Goncharov, Ivan Alexandrovich (1812-91), 409, 564n74; Oblomov (1858), 564n74 Good People of the Three Gorges. See Jia Zhangke Grace, Patricia (1937-), Potiki (1986), 314, 550n76 A Grain of Sand, “Yellow Pearl” (1973), 223 Grand Canal, 37 The Grapes of Wrath. See John Steinbeck Grass, Günter (1927-), Die Rätten (The Rat, 1986), 5, 441n15 Grass Roots Poetry Society, 534n43 Great Leap Forward (Second Five-Year Plan, 1958-61), 38, 463n32, 548n66 Great Northern Wilderness, 511n121 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. See Cultural Revolution Page 658 → The Green Belt Movement. See Wangari Maathai “Green Forever.” See Sakaki Nanao green hypocrisy, 2–3, 39, 54, 352, 407, 417–33, 552n113 Green Leaves (Lüye, 1992), 53 green literature (lüse wenxue), 50–51, 53, 469n103. See also ecological literature; environmental literature green movement. See greenness greenness, 8, 39, 54, 59–60, 182, 324, 389, 425–27, 430 Green New Deal, Japan (Gurn nydru, 2009), 35, 476n165; South Korea (Noksaek nyudil, 2009), 35, 75–76 “The Green of Hiroshima.” See Kurihara Sadako Green Olympics (Lüse aoyun, 2008), 35, 464n46

Green Party, China (Lüdang), 373, 425, 432; Taiwan (Lü Dang, Taioan Lek Tong), 35, 494n301 Greenpeace, 39, 426–28 green technology, 446n49 “A Green Tree.” See Owiti K’Akumu “Green Trickles.” See Nakaoka Jun’ichi Guan Zhong (725-645 B.C.E.), 460n7 Guattari, Félix, The Three Ecologies (Les trois ecologies, 1989), 447n50 “Gu bo xing.” See Du Fu “Gui yuantian ju.” See Tao Yuanming Gu Mengren (1951-), 495n305 Gundam (Gandamu, 1979-), 73 “Guocheng.” See Chen Jingrong Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT), 85, 142, 518n32, 544n18, 550n81, 553n1 Guo Moruo (1892-1978), “Cursing the Sparrow” (“Zhou maque,” 1958), 49, 469n96 Guo Xuebo (1948-), Desert Wolf (Shalang, 1996), 471n125; Wolf Child (Langhai, 2006), 471n125; Wolf Child in the Desert (Damo langhai, 2001), 471n125 Gurn nydru. See Green New Deal Ha Chng-ok (1953-), 491n282 Hadji Murad. See Leo Tolstoy “Haha ni tsurerarete arechi ni sumitsuku.” See It Hiromi Haizi wang. See A Cheng Haizi wang. See Chen Kaige “Hak.” See Hwang Sunwn Hakkdasan shi no hk. See Nitta Jir Halley's Comet, 346, 421, 566n116 Han Chinese, 37, 84–85, 133, 311–17, 381–87, 548nn63, 66, 550nn76, 78, 79 The Handmaid's Tale. See Margaret Atwood Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), 41, 223, 472n126 Han Feizi (280-233 B.C.E.), 461n12 Han Han (1948-), 495nn305, 309; and Ma Yigong, We Have Only One Earth (Women zhi you yige diqiu, 1983),

495n309 Han Han (1982-), 471n126 Han Kang (1970-), 491n283; “The Fruits of My Woman” (“Nae yja i ylmae,” 2000), 326; “The Vegetarian” (“Ch’aesikchuija,” 2007), 491n283, 552n110; “The Vegetarian” (Japanese translation “Saishokushugisha,” 2011), 552n110 Han kkot song i. See Chng Hynjong Han River, 77, 81–83, 492n286 Han Shan (7th-9th c.), 466n68 Han Shaogong (1953-), 29, 50, 470n109, 545n28; Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao cidian, 1996), 545n28; “Pa pa pa” (“Ba ba ba,” 1985), 545n28; and roots-seeking literature, 545n28; “Woman, Woman, Woman” (“Nü nü nü,” 1986), 51, 297–300. See also Nanshan Seminar, “Why Must We Talk about the Environment?” Han Sngwn (1939-), Father and Son (Abji wa adl, 1989), 563n61 Han Yu (768-824), 34, 224, 459n1 The Happening (2008), 567n120 Hara Skei (1718-67), 63, 480n188 Hara Tamiki (1905-51), “Elegy” (“Hika”), 511n118 Page 659 → Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. See Murakami Haruki “Haru wa akebono.” See Sakaki Nanao “Hasu no hana.” See Yi Mija Hatoyama Yukio (1947-), 475n155 Hau Lung-bin (1951-), 496n313 “Hausu puranto.” See It Hiromi Hayashi Fumiko (1903-51), Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, 1951), 67–68, 482n208 Heartless. See Yi Kwangsu The Heart of Darkness. See Joseph Conrad The Heart of Redness. See Zakes Mda The Heavenly Hound. See Jia Pingwa Heaven's Gates. See Wang Lixiong Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856), 514n4 Heisei Badger Wars. See Takahata Isao

Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko. See Takahata Isao He Jinrong. See Bai Qiu Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961), 510n109, 525n80; The Nick Adams Stories (1972), 292; The Old Man and the Sea (1952), 536n65 “The Hero—Enkidu.” See Douglas Livingstone “The Hero—Gilgamesh.” See Douglas Livingstone Herzog, Arthur (1927-2010), The Swarm, 567n120 “He-y, Come on Ou-t.” See Hoshi Shin’ichi Higashi Nihon Daishinsai (Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster). See under earthquakes—Thoku “Hika.” See Hara Tamiki Hikari no ame furu shima Yakushima. See Taguchi Randy “Hikkoshi.” See It Hiromi Himalaya, 418, 420 Himawari robot, 498n5 Hino Keiz (1929-2002), 485n233; Dream Island (Yume no shima, 1985), 485n233 Hirosaki, 407–9 Hiroshima. See atomic bombings “Hiroshima no midori.” See Kurihara Sadako History of the Collapse of Yanaka Village. See Arahata Kanson Hitachi mine pollution, 56, 68 Hitsuji o meguru bken. See Murakami Haruki Hogan, Linda (1947-), 450n68, 485n233, 506n75; People of the Whale (2008), 127; Solar Storms (1995), 528n113 Hjki. See Kamo no Chmei Hokkaido, 70–72, 99–100, 363–64, 366, 399–400, 478n171, 481n197, 529n125, 562n46, 563n47 Hokury Sunflower Festival, 498n4 Holocaust, 125 “Hometown.” See Kim Kwanggyu honeybee, 444n31 Hong Kong, 37, 53, 358 Hong Sngwn (1937-), 491n282

Hong Suli (1947-), 495n305, 497n330 Hong Yinshen, 495n305 “Hope.” See Liu Kexiang “Horn.” See Masuda Mizuko Hoshi Hajime (1873-1951), 542n139 “Hoshi o tabey yo.” See Sakaki Nanao Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926-77), 30, 70, 542n139; “He-y, Come on Ou-t” (“O-i dete ko-i,” 1971), 347, 355–56, 542n139; “Peach Blossom Spring” (“Tgenky,” 1972), 542n139; “The Present” (“Genzai,” 1973), 276–78, 370, 374, 542n139; “Rain” (“Ame,” 1972), 542n139; “Spiteful Planet” (“Ijiwaru na hoshi,” 1972), 107, 518n33, 542n139 Hosokawa family, 551n91 The Host (Koemul, 2006), 492n286 “The House of Small Cubes.” See Kat Kunio “Houseplant.” See It Hiromi Houshan tanxian. See Liu Kexiang Huainianlang. See Jia Pingwa Huang Chunming (1939-), 30, 93; “The Drowning of an Old Cat” (“Nisi yizhi laomao,” 1974), 501n109; “Set Free” (“Fangsheng,” 1987), 27, 132–33, 140–46, 255, 389–93, 459n111, 510nn109, 118 Huang Dongren, 495n305 Page 660 → Huangguoshu waterfall, 41 Huang he. See Yellow River Huang huo. See Wang Lixiong Huang tudi. See Chen Kaige huanjing wenxue. See environmental literature Huanjing Wenxue Yanjiuhui. See Society of Environmental Literature Hulanhe zhuan. See Xiao Hong humanities, discourse on, 435, 568n151 Hundred Years of Solitude. See Gabriel García Márquez The Hungry Tide. See Amitav Ghosh “The Hunt.” See Mahasweta Devi

hunting, 7, 13, 66, 84, 118, 133–40 passim, 196, 226, 238, 249, 400–402, 447n54, 462n23, 474n149, 499n8, 505n57, 507n85, 508nn91, 99, 509n106, 510n108; whales, 129–31, 478n171 “Husband.” See Shen Congwen Husluman Vava (Huosiluman Fafa, 1958-), 495n305 Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963), 531n21 Huxley, Julian (1887-1975), 531n21 Huxley, Thomas (1825-95), 221–22, 531n21; Evolution and Ethics (1893), 221 Huy Lien (pen name of Nguyen Lien) and Charles Waugh, Family of Fallen Leaves (2010), 522n53 “Hwae namu.” See Kim Kwanggyu “Hwangjo ka.” See “Song of the Yellow Birds” Hwang Sk-yng (1943-), 491n282 Hwang Sunwn (1915-2000), 28, 539n94; “Cranes” (“Hak,” 1953), 245, 249–52, 255; “Nature” (“Chayn,” 1966), 539n94 Hwang Tonggyu (1938-), 79; “Flowers in Cement Country” (“Siment’ nara i kkot,” 1993), 490n275; “S.O.S.” (“SOS,” 1993), 83 Hwangyng paeks. See Ministry of Environment “Hwa-san Pylgok.” See Pyn Kyeryang hybrid cars, 11, 446nn47, 49. See also Toyota Prius Hy. See Cho Kyngnan I Am Uncle Star. See Chng Hynjong Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1966), 203; “Crazy Iris” (“Kakitsubata,” 1951), 526n101 Ichijji, 481n195 Ihimaera, Witi (1944-), 506n74; The Whale Rider (1987), 127 “Ijiwaru na hoshi.” See Hoshi Shin’ichi Ikegami Eiichi (1970-), 484n227; Shangri-La (Shanguri-ra, 2005), 72 Imaginary Maps. See Mahasweta Devi Incheon, 489n253 Incident at Yanaka Village. See shika Taku India, 42, 153, 215, 370, 420, 439n3, 451n70, 452n70, 498n332, 507n80, 509n105, 510n108, 512n123, 513n140, 525n85, 528n113, 530n4, 544n16, 547n58, 549n67; and ecocriticism, 451n70 indigenous languages, 507n88

indigenous peoples, 7, 67, 103, 106, 132, 363, 381, 399–400, 404, 505n67, 509n105, 510n107, 563n60; in Alaska, 125–31, 146, 506nn70, 71, 78; in Taiwan, 27, 84–92 passim, 132–35, 139–40, 179, 225, 455n111, 494n302, 495n305, 497n330, 507–8nn84-89, 508n99, 520n40. See also Ainu; Native Americans industrialization, 34, 38, 425, 442n23; China, 51; Japan, 55–56; South Korea, 74–75; Taiwan, 87 “Industrial Zone.” See Ch’oe Sngho information. See under environment—information Inner Mongolia, 147, 310–18, 381–88. See also Jiang Rong “Insect World: Portrait of a Grasshopper.” See Rongzi “Insignificant Stone.” See Yu Hynjong Inspecting Taiwan's Old Trails. See Liu Kexiang intercultural thematic networks, 451n68 Inter Ice Age 4. See Abé Kb International P.E.N. Congress (Tokyo, 2010), 484n228, 485n233, 532n27 Page 661 → International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 531n21 International Whaling Commission, 554n21. See also whaling intertextual, 73, 91, 162–63, 435, 456n94, 485n230, 497n327, 515n11 In the Air. See Robert Nichols “In the 21st Century.” See Sakaki Nanao “In This Land There Still Are Springs.” See Ko n intra-East Asian ecocritical networks, 486n234 intratextual, 161–63, 172, 183, 204, 212, 515n12 The Invention of the Americas. See Enrique Dussel “Inwangsan.” See Kim Kwanggyu Iran, 537n73 Iranian literature, 117, 537n73 Irving, John (1942-), 562n31 Isakawa Masaomi (1930-), 29; “Cosmos Flower” (“Kosumosu no hana,” 1970s), 335, 340–41 Ishigaki. See New Ishigaki Airport Ishikari River, 529n125

Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912), 481n197 Ishimure Michiko (1927-), 68, 482n213; Fish of Heaven (Ten no uo, 1974), 483n214; and It Hiromi, Thinking of Death: In the End We Too Will Become Buddha (Shi o omou: warera mo owari ni wa hotoke nari, 2007), 535n54; Lake of Heaven (Tenko, 1997), 137, 192, 197–203; Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land: Our Minamata Disease (Kugai jdo: Waga Minamataby, 1969), 27, 68–69, 107–19, 123–32 passim, 146, 197, 202, 239, 318–23, 482n214, 483n215, 501n28, 546n42, 551nn86, 90–91; Shiranui (2003), 483n214; “To the Sea of Myth” (“Shinwa no umi e”), 123; Villages of the Gods (Kamigami no mura, 1970-71), 483n214 “Ishimure Michiko and Contemporary Thought.” See It Hiromi “Ishimure Michiko to gendai shis.” See It Hiromi Island Where Shining Rain Falls: Yakushima. See Taguchi Randy Itabashi Botanical Gardens, Tokyo, 453 Itai Itai disease, 56–57, 75, 81 It Hiromi (1955-), 535n54; “Coyote” (“Koyte,” 1987), 484n225; “English, Japanese, Fawnese” (“Eigo, Nihongo, Kanokogo,” 1987), 484n225; “Fawn Murder” (“Kanoko goroshi,” 1985), 484n225; “Houseplant” (“Hausu puranto,” 1998), 468n74, 499n6; and Ishimure Michiko, 535n54; “Ishimure Michiko and Contemporary Thought” (“Ishimure Michiko to gendai shis,” 2006), 501n15; “Moving” (“Hikkoshi,” 1986), 538n84; “Settling on the Wasteland Where Mother Led Us” (“Haha ni tsurerarete arechi ni sumitsuku,” 2005), 229, 232–37; and shamanism, 535n54; Thinking of Death: In the End We Too Will Become Buddha (Shi o omou: warera mo owari ni wa hotoke nari, 2007) (see under Ishimure Michiko—and It Hiromi); translation of medieval Buddhist stories, 535n54; Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Kawara arekusa, 2005), 71. See also Ishimure Michiko It Jinsai (1627-1705), 481n195 “It's a Long Way to Tipperary,” 350 “Itsuka.” See Sakaki Nanao “I ttang e ajikdo saemi itta.” See Ko n It Ta-os (Ken A-sheng, 1957-), 497n330 IUCN. See International Union for the Conservation of Nature Iwata Hiroshi (1932-), 562n46 Japan: environmental degradation (see under environment—degradation in Japan); imperialism in Asia, 460n9 Japanese Landscape. See Shiga Shigetaka Japan Sinks. See Komatsu Saky Japan Volunteer Center, 477n171 Page 662 → Jerusalem Prize. See Murakami Haruki “Ji.” See Shang Qin Jia Dao (779-843), 466n68

Jia Fuxiang (pen name: Zhuang Jia, 1931-), 28, 459n113, 536n65; “People and the Sea” (“Ren yu hai,” 1999), 238, 536n65; Sea Watchers (Kan hai de ren, 1999), 238–40 Jiang Ping, 497n330 Jiang Rong (pen name of Lü Jiamin, 1946-), 452n72, 547n58, 548n65; and Western writers, 547n58; Wolf Totem (Lang tuteng, 2004), 29–30, 53–54, 185, 310–18, 374, 381–89, 415, 452n72, 547n59, 548nn60, 65, 66, 549n67, 550nn79, 82 Jiang Tingyi (1602-45), 44–45, 467n73 Jiang Xun (1947-), 495n305 Jiao Lin (1943-), 497n330 Jia Pingwa (1952-), 50, 469n102, 470n109, 540n105; Defunct Capital (Feidu, 1993), 540n105; Families of Jiwowa Village (Jiwowa de renjia, 1984), 540n105; The Heavenly Hound (Tiangou, 1986), 540n105; Remembering Wolves (Huainianlang, 2000), 53, 548n60; Shangzhou (1987), 540n105; “Songs of the Forest” (“Linqu,” 1979), 245, 252–54, 540n105; Turbulence (Fuzao, 1987), 471n123 Jia Zhangke (1970-), Good People of the Three Gorges (Sanxia haoren, 2006), 472n128 jieji diren (class enemy), 550n81 Jim, Rex Lee (1962-), 508n88 Ji Mingzong, 497n330 Jin Hengbiao (1942-), 495n305 “Jiuge.” See Qu Yuan Jiwowa de renjia. See Jia Pingwa Ji Xian (1913-), 519n35 Jomei Emperor (593-641; r. 629-41), 62, 480n185 Jmon Sugi, 377 Journal of the Kumamoto Medical Society (Kumamoto Igakkai zasshi), 501n26 Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), 514n4 “Kagami.” See Masuda Mizuko Kaik Ken (Takeshi, 1931-89), 482n205 Kain no matsuei. See Arishima Takeo “Kakitsubata.” See Ibuse Masuji K’Akumu, Owiti, “A Green Tree,” 273-74 Kamanaka Hitomi (1958-), Rokkasho Rhapsody, 487n235 Kamigami no mura. See Ishimure Michiko Kamo no Chmei (1155-1216), Ten-Foot Square Hut (Hjki, 1212), 479n180

Kamuiyukara to mukashibanashi. See Kayano Shigeru Kanba Michiko, 552n106. See also U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty protests Kane, Joe (1899-2002), 450n68 Kan hai de ren. See Jia Fuxiang Kanita, 409–11 Kankych. See Environment Agency Kankysh. See Environment Ministry “Kanky to bungaku.” See Gao Xingjian Kan’nani. See Yuasa Katsue “Kanoko goroshi.” See It Hiromi kanshi (Chinese-language poems by Japanese), 63, 480n193, 481n195 Kantner, Seth (1965-), Ordinary Wolves (2005), 548n60 Karafuto. See Sakhalin Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, 528n124 Kat Kunio (1977-), “The House of Small Cubes” (“Tsumiki no ie,” 2008), 73 “Kawa.” See Kurihara Sadako Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), Ancient Capital (Koto, 1962), 68, 497n327; “Myself from Beautiful Japan” (“Utsukushii Nihon no watakushi,” 1968), 341 Kawabe River Dam, 198, 499n8 Kawai Masao (1924-), 482n205 Kawamori Shji (1960-), Earth Maiden Arjuna (Arjuna [Chiky shjo Arjuna], 2001), 487n238 Kawara arekusa. See It Hiromi Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006), 483n222; Yukar, the Ainu Epic and Page 663 →Folktales (Kamuiyukara to mukashibanashi, 1988), 71 Kaze no tani no Naushika. See Miyazaki Hayao Keats, John (1795-1821), 179, 520n40 Kegon Falls, 409 keikan (landscape), 564n73 “Kemuri.” See Masuda Mizuko Ken A-sheng. See It Ta-os

Kexue yuekan. See Xin Yu Khadra, Yasmina. See Mohammed Moulessehoul Khubilai Khan (r. 1260-94), 549n67 “Kigye tosi.” See Cho Sehi Kijima Hajime (1928-), 562n46 Kim Chiha (1941-), 486n234, 491n284; Complete Works of Kim Chiha (Kim Chiha chnjip, 1975), 492n284; “Cry of the People” (“Minjung i sori,” 1974), 83, 491n284; “Vicious Rumors” (“Pi,” 1972), 492n284 Kim Chongsam (1921-84), 491n282 Kim Ch’unsu (1922-2004), 82, 515n14; “Bare Tree” (“Namok,” 1955), 516n14; “Bare Tree and Poetry” (“Namok kwa si,” 1957), 516n14; Cloud and Rose (Kurm kwa changmi, 1948), 515n14; “Dream of a Winter Night” (“Kyul pam i kkum,” 1964), 516n14; “Flowers” (“Kkot,” 1947), 516n14; “Flowers” (“Kkot,” 1952), 516n14; “Landscape” (“Punggyng,” 1988), 164–65, 169–71, 187; “Sketches of a Flower” (“Kkot i somyo,” 1956), 516n14; “Turtle in the Flower Garden” (“Kkot pat’ e tn kbuk,” 1954), 515n14 Kim Hyesun (1955-), 82; Please Look, Mr. Manager of the Calendar Factory (Tallyk kongjang kongjangjangnim poseyo, 1997), 538n77; A Poor Love Machine (Pulssanghan sarang kigye, 1997), 538n77; “Song of Skin” (“Kk pchil i norae,” 1985), 241–46 Kim Kwanggyu (1941-), 28, 30, 84, 191, 514n4; “April's Roadside Trees” (“Sawl i karosu,” 1991), 270–74; The Final Dream that Drenches Us: Collection of Kim Kwanggyu's Poetry (Uri rl chksinn majimak kkum: Kim Kwanggyu sijip, 1989), 491n280, 514n4; and German writers, 514n4; “Ghosts” (“Yuryng,” 1979), 185–90; “Hometown” (“Kohyang,” 1979), 81–83; “Mount Inwang” (“Inwangsan,” 1983), 240–41, 244–45; “Old Pine Tree” (“Nlgn sonamu,” 1986), 402–4, 554n18; “Pagoda Tree” (“Hwae namu,” 1986), 335–37; “Relationship of Thoughts” (“Saenggak i sai,” 1979), 156–60, 164, 210, 515n8; “Spirit Mountain” (“Yngsan,” 1991), 519n33 Kim Kwangsp (1905-77), “The Pigeons of Sngbuk-dong” (“Sngbukdong pidulgi,” 1968), 80 Kim Kyngnin (1918-), Kim Suyng (1921-68), and Pak Inhwan (1926-56), The New City and the Chorus of Citizens: New Poetics Collection of Poetry (Saeroun tosi wa simindl i hapch’ang: sin siron sijip, 1949), 523n66 Kim Myngsu (1945-), 491n282 Kimoto Shji (1912-95), Shisaka Island (Shisakajima, 1972), 68 Kim Suyong (1921-68), 491n282. See also Kim Kyngnin Kim Tongin (1900-1951), “Mad Flame Sonata” (“Kwangym sonat’a,” 1929), 558n86 Kim Wnil (1942-), Meditation on a Snipe (Toyosae e kwanhan myngsang, 1979), 80–81 Kim Yngha (1968-), 77, 489n260 Kim Yongt’aek (1948-), 491n282 Kim Yujng (1908-37), 491n282 “Kindhearted Tree.” See Yu Ch’ihwan King of Chess. See A Cheng

King of Children. See A Cheng King of the Children. See Chen Kaige King of Trees. See A Cheng King Solomon's Ring: New Light on Animal Ways. See Konrad Z. Lorenz King Wu of Zhou (r. 1046-1043 B.C.E.), 37 Page 664 → “Kinosaki ni te.” See Shiga Naoya Kinuta ken (Kinuta Park), 453n79 Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936), 370 “Kip’n hlk.” See Chng Hynjong Kirigamine mountains, 70 Kiri no shisontachi. See Nitta Jir “Kkpchil i norae.” See Kim Hyeson “Kkot” (1947). See Kim Ch’unsu “Kkot” (1952). See Kim Ch’unsu “Kkot” (1986). See Ko n “Kkot pat’ e tn kbuk.” See Kim Ch’unsu “Kkot i somyo.” See Kim Ch’unsu “Kkumkku nn chimsng.” See Yi Ch’angdong Klein, Olaf, Aftertime (Nachzeit, 1999), 550n77 KMT. See Guomindang Koarnhak Tarn (Chen Guanxue, 1934-), 495n305 Kobi. See Ch’oe Sngho Kodama. See Taguchi Randy “Kdo 10,700 m.” See Sakaki Nanao Koemul (The Host, 2006), 492n296 Koganei Yoshikiyo (1858-1944), 542n139 Kogury (37 B.C.E.-668 C.E.), 77–78, 487n239 “Kohyang.” See Kim Kwanggyu “Kohyang ro kann param.” See Mun Sunt’ae

Kojiki. See Record of Ancient Matters Komatsu Saky (1931-2011), “Blue Sky” (“Aozora,” 1973), 70–71; Descendants of Adam (Adamu no sue, 1973), 70; Japan Sinks (Nippon chinbotsu, 1973), 70, 483n220; “Silent Corridor” (“Seijaku no tsro,” 1973), 70–71 Komunyakaa, Yusef (1947-), Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006), 448n55 “Kongjang chidae.” See Ch’oe Sngho “Kono hana tanens.” See Sakaki Nanao Konsento. See Taguchi Randy Koola Madari. See Perumal Murugan Korea, environmental degradation. See under environment—degradation in Korea Korean Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM), 488n249 Korean War (1950-53), 74–79 passim, 190, 249, 265, 336, 488n251, 489nn256, 260, 539n94, 541n133 Kosaka copper mine pollution, 56 “Kosumosu no hana.” See Isakawa Masaomi Koto. See Kawabata Yasunari kotodama, 198, 482n202 Kot’ong i ch’ukche. See Chng Hynjong Ko n (1933-), 28, 30, 82, 486n234, 487n239, 523n64; “At Ppsngp’o” (“Ppsngp’o e s,” 1991), 359–60; “First Snow” (“Ch’t nun,” 1988), 185, 189–91; “Flowers” (“Kkot,” 1986), 405–7, 488n248; Going to Muni Village (Muni mal e kas, 1974), 523n64; “In This Land There Still Are Springs” (“I ttang e ajikdo saemi itta,” 1986), 192–95, 204; Mount Paektu (Paektusan, 1987-94), 523n64; “A Single Teardrop” (“Nunmul han pangul,” 1974), 258–59; “Supung Dam” (“Sup’ungho”), 487n239; Ten Thousand Lives (Maninbo, 1986-2010), 523n64; “When May is Gone” (“Owli kamyn,” 1986), 525n79; “Yngil Bay-1” (“Yngil man-1,” 1991), 296–97, 413 Koxinga (1624-62), 84 “Koyte.” See It Hiromi Die Krötenküsser. See Günter Seuren Kugai jdo: Waga Minamataby. See Ishimure Michiko “Kge mwni.” See Chng Hynjong Kumamoto Igakkai zasshi (Journal of the Kumamoto Medical Society), 501n26 Kumamoto University, 58, 320, 501n26 Kmgangsan (Diamond Mountains), 82 Kunetka, James (1944-). See Whitley Strieber Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908), “Musashi Plain” (“Musashino,” 1898), 481n197; “Unforgettable Page 665 →People” (“Wasureenu hitobito,” 1898), 481n197

kunimi (land looking), 62 Kurihara Sadako (1913-2005), 528n112; “Another Clock” (“M hitotsu no tokei,” 1983), 527n112; “The Green of Hiroshima” (“Hiroshima no midori,” 1960), 511n118; “The River” (“Kawa,” 1966), 511n118 Kuroi ame. See Ibuse Masuji Kurm kwa changmi. See Kim Ch’unsu Kwangju protests, 525n79, 537n77 “Kwangym sonat’a.” See Kim Tongin “Kwisin ch’rm.” See Chng Hynjong Kwn Kn (1352-1409), 490n265; “Song of the Censor” (“Sangdae pylgok,” 1419), 77 Kwn Taeun (1612-99), “Passing the Old Capital,” 524n70 Kyger, Joanne (1934-), 485n230 Kyoto, 68, 72, 346, 376, 423–24, 479n180, 567n128 “Kyul e pada e kassta.” See Ch’oe Sngja “Kyul pam i kkum.” See Kim Ch’unsu Lake of Heaven. See Ishimure Michiko Lake Tanganyika, 444n31 “Laments of the Copper Hills.” See Wang Taiyue “land health,” 448n56 Lan Dingyuan (1680-1733), 89 land looking (kunimi), 62 land mines, 77, 266, 269–70, 446n49, 489n260, 541n133 landscape, denotation, 437n2; in literature, 42, 61, 65, 71, 87, 91, 153, 164–65, 261, 409–10, 417, 481n197, 564n73 “Landscape.” See Kim Ch’unsu landscape painting, 461n11 “Landscape Philosophy.” See Wang Runhua landscape poetry (shanshui shi), 42, 466nn65–68 Lang Dingyuan (1680-1733), 496n315 Langhai. See Guo Xuebo Lang tuteng. See Jiang Rong

Lanxing Shihui (Blue Star Poetry Society), 519n35 Laos, 146, 465n54 Lao She (1899-1966), Dragon Beard Ditch (Longxugou, 1951, 1952, 2009), 469n96; Four Generations under One Roof (Si shi tongtang), 496n99; The Yellow Storm (1951), 469n99 Laakara k khir siph: Bhopla gaisa trsad para dhrita. See Kamr Lla Zkira “The Last Angler.” See Li Hangyu “The Last Black-Faced Dancers.” See Liu Kexiang The Last Communist Virgin. See Wang Ping The Last Horse Caravan. See Tian Zhuangzhuang “The Last Hunter.” See Topas Tamapima “The Last One.” See W. S. Merwin LED traffic signal, 446n49 Lee, Sr., Anthony, 380 Lee Myung Bak (Lee Myngbak, 1941-), 75, 488n251 legalism, 36 Le Guin, Ursula K. (1929-), The Word for World is Forest (1972), 518n33 “Leopard.” See Xin Yu Leopold, Aldo (1887-1948), 484n228, 500n9; A Sand County Almanac, 51, 448n56, 449n58, 495n303 “Let's Eat Stars.” See Sakaki Nanao “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule.” See Lucille Lang Day Li. See Bamboo Hat Liang Congjie (1932-2010), 39, 463n37 Liang Qichao (1873-1929), 222, 463n37 Liang Xiaosheng (1949-), 470n109 Liao Hongji (1957-), 495n305 Liao Hongmu (1957-), 495n305 Li Bai (701-62), 466n68 life narrative, 3, 440n9 Page 666 → Life of Pi. See Yann Martel

Li Hangyu (1957-), “The Last Angler” (“Zuihou yige yulaoer,” 1982), 502n37 Li Jiemu, 495n305 Like a Ball that Bounces When It Falls. See Chng Hynjong “Like a Ghost.” See Chng Hynjong “Lines on Not Beating the Ox.” See Yi Kyubo Lin Fengming, 497n330 Lingshan. See Gao Xingjian Lin Jianlong, 497n330 Lin Junyi, 495n305 “Linqu.” See Jia Pingwa Lin Shaowen, 495n305 Lin Wenyi (1953-), “On the Right Bank of the City Moat” (“Zai huchenghe youan,” 1993), 87 Li Qingsong (1966-), 470n109 literature, functions, 4–6, 13–17, 25–26, 30–31, 93–95, 433–34; future, 30, 434–35; “usability,” 441n18. See also comparative literature; conceptual networks; thematic networks; world literature Literature and Environment (Bungaku to kanky), 484n228 Literature and Environment (Munhak kwa hwangyng), 493n289 Literature and Thought (Munhak sasang), 518n27 Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf. See Cho Sehi Little Green Hill series. See Liu Kexiang Liu Guixian (1945-), 471n118; Crisis of the Source of Life (Shengming zhi yuan de weiji, 1989), 471n118; “Water Pollution in China” (“Zhongguo de shui wuran,” 1989), 471n118 Liu Kexiang (1957-), 28, 86–87, 93, 486n234, 495nn305–7, 309, 539n102; Adventures into Back Mountains (Houshan tanxian, 1993), 495n309; “Beautiful Small World” (“Meili xiao shijie,” 1984), 519n33; and Gary Snyder, 540n102; and Henry David Thoreau, 540n102; “Hope” (“Xiwang,” 1984), 245, 251–52; Inspecting Taiwan's Old Trails (Taiwan jiu lu tachaji, 1995), 496n309; “The Last Black-Faced Dancers” (“Zuihou de heimian wuzhe,” 1992), 496n310; Little Green Hill (Xiao lü shan) series, 496n309; and Matsuo Bash, 540n102; “A Nature Writer in Taiwan,” 495n307; “Taiwan's Nature Writers: Between Tradition and Ecology” (“Taiwan no shizenha sakka: dent to seitaigaku no hazama de,” 2004), 539n102; The Wind Bird Pinuocha (Feng niao Pinuocha, 1991), 495n309 “Liuxing gequ.” See Luo Qing Liu Xinwu (1942-), 470n109 Liu Zongyuan (733-819), 459n1, 466n68; Theory of Heaven (Tian shuo, 814), 32–34; “Troubles on the Road” (“Xing lu nan”), 45, 468n75

The Lives of Animals. See J. M. Coetzee Living on the Agano. See Sat Makoto Livingstone, Douglas (1932-96), “A Death of Green,” 557n72; “The Hero—Enkidu” (1968), 448n55; “The Hero—Gilgamesh” (1968), 448n55 Li Yueshi, 471n118 “Loggers, Wake Up!” See Xu Gang “Logging.” See Ch’oe Sngho London, Jack (1876-1916), 370, 547n58, 559n96; Call of the Wild (1903), 548n60; “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910), 559n96; White Fang (1906), 548n60; and the Yellow Peril, 369, 559n96 Longoria, Arturo (1948-), Adios to the Brushlands (1997), 550n83 Long Parting from the Sea. See Yi Namhi Longxugou. See Lao She The Loop. See Nicholas Evans Lorenz, Konrad Z. (1903-89), King Solomon's Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen, 1949), 494n303 “Lotus Flower.” See Yi Mija Page 667 → “love of nature.” See under nature—and human harmony Lüdang. See Green Party Lü Jiamin. See Jiang Rong Lü Le (1957-), The Foliage (Meiren cao, 2004), 472n12 Luo Qing (pen name of Luo Qingzhe, 1948-), 518n32; “Pop Songs” (“Liuxing gequ,” 1972), 175; “Syllogisms” (“Sanduan lunfa”), 518n32 Luo Qingzhe. See Luo Qing Luo Yan. See Shang Qin lüse wenxue. See green literature Lu Xun (1881-1936), 49, 468n82, 519n37; “Autumn Night” (“Qiuye,” 1924), 47–48; Call to Arms (Nahan, 1922), 468n85; Wild Grass (Yecao, 1927), 47, 468n82 Lüye. See Green Leaves Lu Yu (1125-1210), 466n68 Lyrics of Chu. See Qu Yuan Maathai, Wangari (1940-2011), The Green Belt Movement (1985), 536n71

Ma Bo (1947-), Blood Red Sunset (Xuese huanghun, 1988), 148 Madagascar, 7 “Mad Flame Sonata.” See Kim Tongin Maehara Seiji, 499n7 Ma Jianguo. See Wei An Makabe Jin (1907-84), “Young Green” (“Midori osanaku”), 511n118 Makkura: jokfu kara no kikigaki. See Morisaki Kazue Makura no sshi. See Sei Shnagon mamushi (viper), 365–66, 558n82 Manchuria (northeast China), 37, 460n9, 482n207, 548n62, 559n96, 564n80, 565n82 manga, 70, 72–73, 423, 487n238, 547n59 Maninbo. See Ko n Mansa and the Nagara River: A Man Who Lived on the “Last River” (Mansa to Nagaragawa: “Saigo no kawa” ni ikita otoko). See Amano Reiko Man’ysh. See Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves Mao Dun (pen name of Shen Dehong, Shen Yanbing, 1896-1981), 545n20; Midnight (Ziye, 1930), 293 Mori, 127, 314, 506n74, 509n105 Mao Zedong (1893-1976), 38, 50, 462n30; in literature, 205; Yan’an Talks, 49 “Mapinguari: One-Eyed Ogre,” 567n120 Maqiao cidian. See Han Shaogong Márquez, Gabriel García (1927-),Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967), 470n106 Martel, Yann (1963-), Life of Pi (2001), 540n115 Maruyama Park, 424 Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), 479n174 Master of the Mountain. See A Cheng Masuda Mizuko (1948-), 28, 71, 536n64; “Horn” (“Tsuno,” 1995), 245–49, 252, 406; “Mirror” (“Kagami,” 1996), 29, 281–83; “Single Sickness” (“Dokushinby,” 1981), 237, 536n64; “Smoke” (“Kemuri,” 1995), 261–65, 270 Matsuo Bash (1644-94), 480n193, 540n102; Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi, 1694), 63–64 Matsutake mushrooms, 364–66, 558nn84–85 Matsuura Takeshir, 529n125

“Maverick.” See Wang Ping Ma Yigong (1948-), 495n305 McCarthy, Cormac (1933-), The Road (2006), 204, 527n102 McClure, Michael (1932-), 485n230 McEwan, Ian (1948-), Solar (2010), 544n15 Mda, Zakes (1929-), The Heart of Redness (2000), 509n105 meat industry. See Ruth Ozeki Meditation on a Snipe. See Kim Wnil A Meditative Journey to America's Walden (Amerika Walden shisaku no tabi, 1994), 487n238 Meiji period (1868-1912), 55, 56, 65, 66, 410, 481n197, 535n54 Meiji University, 58 “Meili xiao shijie.” See Liu Kexiang Page 668 → Meiren cao. See Lü Le Mei Yaochen (1002-60), 466n68 Mekong River, 41, 465n54 Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. See Nawal El Saadawi Memories of Agano. See Sat Makoto Memories of Mountain Peaks. See Watanabe Jun’ichi Memories of Xinjiang. See Wang Lixiong menace, 445n39 Mencius (372-289 B.C.E.), 33; Ox Mountain parable, 460n7 Meng Dongli (1937-2009), 495n305 Meng Haoran (689-740), 466n68 Meng Jiao (751-814), 466n68 menglong shi. See Misty Poetry Menicanti, Daria (1914-95), “Chameleon” (“Camaleonte,” 1962), 538n87; “Felines” (“Felini,” 1986), 168 mercury pollution, 57–58, 109, 112–15, 122, 319–21, 476n156, 478n171, 499n8, 504n51, 551n90 Merwin, W. S. (1927-), 485n233; “The Last One” (1967), 153, 513n140, 555n33

Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, 94 “Metropolis 3.” See Mun Tksu “Metropolitan Nightmare.” See Stephen Vincent Benét Miao, 37 Middle East, 17, 18, 166, 497n331 Midnight. See Mao Dun “Midori eien nari.” See Sakaki Nanao “Midori ga shitatari.” See Nakaoka Jun’ichi “Midori osanaku.” See Makabe Jin Mihara Katsutoshi, 499n7 Miki Taku (1932-), 482n205 Mikksen Suianmaru. See Nitta Jir Milky Way, 92, 211–12, 242, 421 mimicry, 445n39 Minamata. See W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith Minamataby-kanjasan to sono sekai. See Tsuchimoto Noriaki Minamata disease, 57–58, 68–69, 71, 73, 81, 475n153, 475n155, 475n156, 551n90, 551n93, 552n100; relief for victims, 475n155, 475–76n156. See also Hatoyama Yukio; Ishimure Michiko; Ogata Masato; iwa Keib; Thailand; Tsuchimoto Noriaki Minamata Disease Comprehensive Research Group, 551n90 Minamata Disease—Patients and Their World. See Tsuchimoto Noriaki Mine no kioku. See Watanabe Jun’ichi mines, extractive, 47–48, 56, 473n134, 474n147; land (see land mines) Ming dynasty (1368-1644), 37, 41, 46, 462n23 Minh Chuyên, 521n53 Ministry of Environment (Hwangyngbu), Environment White Pages (Hwangyng paeks), 488n250 “Minjung i sori.” See Kim Chiha “Mirror.” See Masuda Mizuko Mishima Yukio (1925-70), Decay of the Angel (Tennin gosui, 1970), 68 Mi Shisen. See Xin Yu

Misty Poetry (menglong shi), 50 Miyake Island, 346 Miyao Tomiko (1926-), Red Summer (Shuka, 1985), 482n207 Miyazaki Hayao (1941-), 487n236; Nausicaä of the Windy Valley (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1982-94), 73; Princess Mononoke (Mononokehime, 1997), 73–74 Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), 28, 66, 237, 459n113, 481n201, 532n31; “Bears of Mount Nametoko” (“Nametoko yama no kuma,” 1934), 153, 225–28; concern for the environment, 532n31; “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” (“Frandon Ngakk no buta,” 1934), 347–51, 356, 556nn38–51; “Kenj's Wood” (“Kenj kenrin”), 532n31; “The Restaurant of Many Orders” (“Chmon no i ryriten,” 1924), 66 model plays (yangban xi), 469n100 Modern Literature (Xiandai wenxue), 553n1 Moeagaru midori no ki. See e Kenzabur Page 669 → “M hitotsu no tokei.” See Kurihara Sadako Monet, Claude (1840-1926), 485n229 Mongols, 310–18, 381–88, 548n66, 549n67. See also Jiang Rong Monju reactor, 209, 419–20, 528n122, 566n111 “Mo no aru keshiki.” See Yamanoguchi Baku Mononokehime. See Miyazaki Hayao Mori gai (Rintar, 1862-1922), 542n139 Morisaki Kazue (1927-), 501n15; Pitch Dark: Stories Narrated by Female Miners (Makkura: jokfu kara no kikigaki, 1961), 483n215 “Morning.” See Yi Sang Morris, George Pope (1902-64), “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” 532n31 “Mosquitoes.” See Shang Qin Mother Goose, 543n3 motherhood, 535n54, 537n73; in literature, 59, 122, 207, 226, 229, 233–35, 241–44, 296–97, 328–35, 382–83, 534n37, 535n54, 537n73, 538n82 mother tongue, 455n91, 527n103 Moulessehoul, Mohammed (pen name: Yasmina Khadra, 1955-), Morituri (1997), 542n142 mountain pine beetle, 442n24 “The Mountains and My Father.” See Yaronglong Sakinu

mountains, attitudes toward, 460n11 “Mountains, Mountains, Mountains.” See Sin Skchng “Mountain Spirit.” See Qu Yuan Mount Everest, 420, 566n113 Mount Fuji, 483n217 Mount Fuji. See Taguchi Randy Mount Hwa, 77, 490n265 “Mount Inwang.” See Kim Kwanggyu Mount Iwaki, 407–8 Mount Kagu, 62, 480n185 Mount Paektu. See Ko n “Moving.” See It Hiromi “Mowing Grasses” (“Zaishan”), 42–43, 467n71 Mudhakkirt tabbah. See Nawal El Saadawi Muir, John (1838-1914), 444n35; The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), 444n35 Mujng. See Yi Kwangsu “Mukade.” See Asakura Kikuo “Mulso kajuk kabang.” See Ch’oe Sngho “Mul wi e mul arae.” See Ch’oe Sngho Munhak kwa hwangyng (Literature and Environment), 493n289 Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought), 518n27 “Municipal Gum.” See Oodgeroo Noonuccal Munif, Abdelrahman (1933-2004), 450n68 Mun Insu (1945-), 491n282 “Munmyng i sasin.” See Chng Hynjong Mun Sunt’ae (1941-), “Wind Going to the Hometown” (“Kohyang ro kann param,” 1977), 80 Mun Tksu (1928-), 82, 524n69; “Cemetery” (“Myoji,” 2002), 524n69; “Conscience” (“Yangsim,” 2002), 192–93, 197, 204; “Dawn Sea” (“Saebyk pada,” 1976), 185, 190–91; “Metropolis 3” (“Tosi 3,” 1988), 543n5; “Rumors about Buildings 3” (“Pilding e kwanhan somun 3,” 1997), 490n275 Muni mal e kas. See Ko n “Mui cúa rng.” See Nguyn Huy Thip

Murakami Haruki (1949-), 30, 71–72, 561n31; 1Q84 (2009-10), 562n31; “Always on the Side of the Egg,” 562n32; best-sellers, 561n31; “The Elephant's Disappearance” (“Z no shmetsu,” 1985), 384, 393–99, 402; HardBoiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Sekai no owari to hdoboirudo wandrando, 1987), 562n31; Jerusalem Prize, 393; Norwegian Wood (Noruei no mori, 1987), 562n31; The Place that Was Promised: Underground 2 (Yakusoku sareta basho de: Andguraundo 2), 562n31; “Slow Boat to China” Page 670 →(“Ch goku yuki no sur bto,” 1980), 562n32; Underground (Andguraundo, 1997), 562n31; A Wild Sheep Chase (Hitsuji o meguru bken, 1982), 562n31; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1995), 561n31 Murano Shir (1901-75), 543n3 “Musashino.” See Kunikida Doppo “Musashi Plain.” See Kunikida Doppo Mu Shiying (1912-40), “Shanghai Foxtrot” (“Shanghai de hubuwu,” 1932), 48–49 mushrooms. See Matsutake mushrooms Music Bureau poetry (yuefu, Han dynasty 206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), 41–42 The Music of Nature: Zhuangzi Speaks. See Cai Zhizhong “Musn slp’m i.” See Chng Hynjong Myanmar (Burma), 41, 146 My Ántonia. See Willa Cather “Myoji.” See Mun Tksu myopia, 282–91 myopic hyperopia, 283–91 “Myself from Beautiful Japan.” See Kawabata Yasunari My Year of Meats. See Ruth Ozeki “Nabete yo wa koto mo nashi.” See Sakaki Nanao Nachzeit. See Olaf Klein “Nae yja i ylmae.” See Han Kang Nagano, 70, 420, 566n111 Nagara River, 71, 419–20, 483–84n223. See also Amano Reiko; dams Nagasaki. See atomic bombings Nagatsuka Takashi (1879-1915), The Earth (Tsuchi, 1910), 65, 481n198 Nagatsu Kzabur, Atomic Bomb Poetry: Collection of Poems by 181 People (Genbakushi 181 ninsh, 2007), 335, 510n118 Nagoya, 58, 235, 418–19 Nahan. See Lu Xun

Nakano Shigeharu (1902-79), 562n46 Nakano Yoshio (1903-85), 492n284 Nakaoka Jun’ichi (1937-), “Green Trickles” (“Midori ga shitatari,” 2000s), 335, 340–41, 554n26 Nakasone Yasuhiro (1918-), 59, 476n163, 555n35 Nakayasu Akira, Himawari robot, 498n5 Naktong River, 75, 242 “Nametoko no yama no kuma.” See Miyazawa Kenji “Namok.” See Kim Ch’unsu “Namok kwa si.” See Kim Ch’unsu Nanao or Never: Nanao Sakaki Walks Earth A, 485n230 Nanjangi ka ssoa ollin chagn kong. See Cho Sehi Nanshan Seminar, “Why Must We Talk about the Environment?” (1999), 545n28. See also Han Shaogong Na nn pyl ajssi. See Chng Hynjong Narrow Road to the Deep North. See Matsuo Bash National Institute of Minamata Disease, 499n8 National Security Law, 491n284 Native Americans, 126, 506n72, 522n53, 535n54; and literature, 127, 528n113, 558n75. See also indigenous peoples native soil literature (xiangtu wenxue), 48 nativist literature in Taiwan, 90, 132, 141. See also Huang Chunming “Nature.” See Hwang Sunwn “Nature.” See Yi Sngbu nature, denotation, 437n2; and human harmony in literature, 4, 6, 18, 33, 35, 42, 54, 61; “love” of, 6, 9, 27, 30, 50, 54, 59, 61, 86, 103, 105, 107, 123, 154–55, 199, 238, 380–81, 380–437 passim, 444n35, 479n173, 487n238, 489n260, 499n6, 500n12, 504n50, 526n99, 531n25, 557n70, 560n2; retrograde concept of, 438n2. See also environment “Nature and Rousseau.” See Sin Skchng Nature Conservation Law (Shizen Kanky Hozenh, 1972), 58 Page 671 → Nature Conservation Society of Japan (Nihon Shizen Hogo Kykai), 474n150 The Nature of Things. See David Suzuki

Nature's End. See Whitley Strieber Nature's Nation, 445n40 “A Nature Writer in Taiwan.” See Liu Kexiang “nature writing,” 20-21, 35, 454n87, 467n69, 484n229; in Taiwan (ziran shuxie, ziran xiezuo), 86–87, 90–91, 93, 495n305, 495n306, 495n309, 497n325 Nausicaä of the Windy Valley. See Miyazaki Hayao Navajo, 380, 508n88 Naya Hiromi, 58 Ndebele, Njabulo S. (1948-), 5, 440n13 nebula, artistic contact and literary contact, 94, 456n93, 498n338. See also contact space Nejimakidori kuronikuru. See Murakami Haruki Neo-Confucianism, 461n14. See also Confucianism Neqou Sokluman (Niekou Suokeluman, 1975-), 495n305 Nettai urin. See Tatematsu Wahei networks, literary, 23. See also conceptual networks; intra-East Asian ecocritical networks; thematic networks The New City and the Chorus of Citizens: New Poetics Collection of Poetry. See Kim Kyngnin and Kim Suyng New Classic Singers, 543n4. See also Tanikawa Shuntar New Ishigaki Airport (Shin Ishigaki Kk), 555n35 “News.” See Yang Mu New Songdo City, 489n253 New Yorkers. See Bai Xianyong Nguyn Duy (1948-), 522n53 Nguyn Huy Thip (1950-), “The Salt of the Jungle” (“Mui cúa rng”), 533n32; “The Winds of Hua Tat” (“Con thú l n nht”), 533n32 Nguyen Lien. See Huy Lien Nguyn Ngc (pen name: Nguyn Trung Thành, 1932-), “Xanu Forest” (“Rng xà nu,” 1965), 521n53 Nguyn Trung Thành. See Nguyn Ngc The Nick Adams Stories. See Ernest Hemingway Nicols, Robert (1919-), In the Air (1991), 530n4 Nihon fkeiron. See Shiga Shigetaka

“Nihonjin no senzo.” See Sakaki Nanao Nihon Shizen Hogo Kykai. See Nature Conservation Society of Japan Niigata-Chetsu Oki earthquake, 528n124 Niigata Minamata disease, 57, 58, 108, 321, 476n156 Niihama refinery pollution incident (1893), 56, 474n146 Nijoku knen no kodoku. See Tanikawa Shuntar NIMBY (Not in My Backyard), 133 “Nine Songs.” See Qu Yuan Ningen shikkaku. See Dazai Osamu Nippon chinbotsu. See Komatsu Saky Nishikawa Mitsuru (1908-99), Sulfur Expedition (Sairy ki, 1942), 89, 496n316 Nishimura Shigeo, suicide, 528n122 “Nisi yizhi laomao.” See Huang Chunming Nitta Jir (1912-80), 482n212, 483n217, 505n66; Complete Works of Nitta Jir (Nitta Jir zensh), 506n68; Death March on Mount Hakkda (Hakkdasan shi no hk, 1971), 505n68; Descendants of the Mist (Kiri no shisontachi, 1970), 70; Stowaway Ship Suianmaru (Mikksen Suianmaru, 1982), 506n68; Tale of Alaska (Arasuka monogatari, 1974), 107, 125–32, 146, 399; The Tall Smokestack of a Certain Town (Aru machi no takai entotsu, 1968), 68 Nitta Jir zensh. See Nitta Jir Niuyue ke. See Bai Xianyong “Nobel Lecture.” See e Kenzabur Noda Yoshihiko (1957-), 60 Noh drama, 198, 483n214 Page 672 → Noike Motoki (1958-), 555n35; and Sakaki Nanao, 555n35 No Impact Man. See Colin Beavan Noksaek nyudil. See Green New Deal No Longer Human. See Dazai Osamu Noma Hiroshi (1915-91), 479n178 nonhuman, denotation, 437n2, 438n2 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo (Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska, Kath Walker, 1920-93), “Municipal Gum” (1964), 404, 563n60; We are Going (1964), 563n60

noosphere, 24, 457nn99, 100 Northeast Asia Anti-Sandstorm Alliance, 41 Northeast Asian Biodiversity Corridor, 94 North Korea, 76, 82, 88, 249, 265–66, 336, 487n239, 496n313, 541n128 North Pole, 559n102 Noruei no mori. See Murakami Haruki Norwegian Wood. See Murakami Haruki “Nostalgia.” See Yu Guangzhong nuclear power, 57–60, 75, 86–88, 447n53, 459n4, 476n161, 494n301, 499n8, 528nn120, 124, 529n125; Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns (2011), 59–60, 105, 447n53, 476n161, 477n169; in literature, 99–102, 208–10, 346, 363, 419, 422–24, 427, 487. See also Chernobyl; Monju reactor “Nkdae.” See Chn Sngt’ae “Nlgn sonamu.” See Kim Kwanggyu “Nunmul han pangul.” See Ko n “Nü nü nü.” See Han Shaogong Obama, President Barack (1961-), 133, 507n83, “birther conspiracy,” 443n29 Oblomov. See Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov Odagiri Hideo (1916-2000), 562n46 Oda Makoto (1932-2007), 492n284 e Kenzabur (1935-), 72; Flaming Green Tree (Moeagaru midori no ki, 1993-94), 52, 470n115; “History Repeats” (2011), 60; and Kim Chiha, 492n284; “Nobel Lecture” (1994), 470n114, 492n284; and Zheng Yi, 52, 470n114 Of Birds and Men. See Chen Huang Ogata Masato (1953-), 502n40; Chisso Was I (Chisso wa watashi de atta, 2001), 502n40; and iwa Keib, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World: An Unauthorized History of Minamata Disease (Tokoyo no fune o kogite: Minamataby shishi, 1996), 71, 107, 119–25, 127, 132, 146, 502n40, 503nn40, 45, 505nn56, 60; Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001), 71, 107, 110, 120–25, 127, 132, 146, 503nn40, 45, 504n51, 505n60 Oguma Hideo (1901-40), 30, 562n46; “Flying Sled” (“Tobu sori,” 1935), 66, 399–402 Ogura Toyofumi (1899-1966), Record from the End of the World (Zetsugo no kiroku, 1948), 544n12 “O-i dete ko-i.” See Hoshi Shin’ichi iwa Keib (pen name: Tsuji Shin’ichi), 502n40; Slow is Beautiful: Slow Culture (Sur izu byteifuru: ososa to shite no bunka, 2001), 502n40. See also Ogata Masato and iwa Keib ji Paper Company (ji Seishi Kabushiki Kaisha), 400 Oka Kunsh (fl. ca. 1814), 63, 480n189 Oku no hosomichi. See Matsuo Bash

Okunoshima, 489n260 Olafioye, Tayo, 450n68 The Old Man and the Sea. See Ernest Hemingway The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. See Luis Ramiro Sepúlveda “Old Pine Tree.” See Kim Kwanggyu Olonbulag, 311, 314–17, 548n62 Olympics, 20, 35, 75, 405, 407, 420, 454n86, 464n46, 563n61, 566n111 On “Asian” Shores: Dialogue between a Japanese Poet and a Korean Poet. See Yoshimasu Gz one-child policy, 39 “On Killing a Tree.” See Gieve Patel Onsan disease, 75, 81, 83, 296, 488n246 Page 673 → “On the Right Bank of the City Moat.” See Lin Wenyi Orchid Island, 86 Ordinary Wolves. See Seth Kantner Orphan of Asia. See Wu Zhuoliu Orwell, George (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-50), Animal Farm (1945), 347, 555n38; “Preface to ‘Kolghosp Tvaryn,’” 555n37; “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), 467n69 shika Taku (1898-1959), Incident at Yanaka Village (Yanakamura jiken, 1957), 482n202; Watarase River (Watarasegawa, 1941), 482nn202, 211 Ouch Ouch disease (itai itai by), 56–57, 75, 81 “Our Sinking Land.” See Xu Gang Outlet. See Taguchi Randy overpopulation. See population “Owli kamyn.” See Ko n Ox Mountain. See Mencius Ozeki, Ruth (1956-), My Year of Meats (1998), 240, 489n260, 536n72, 567n127 Pada ro put’ i kin ibyl. See Yi Namhi Paektusan. See Ko n “Pagoda Tree.” See Kim Kwanggyu Pak Inhwan (1926-56), 523n66; “Black River” (“Kmn kang,” 1955), 185. See also Kim Kyngnin

Pak Tujin (1916-98), 79 Palace of the Dragon King, 113 Paleolithic cave paintings, 13 “Pa pa pa.” See Han Shaogong “Paperboy.” See Yang Kui Park Chung Hee (Pak Chnghi, 1917-79), 74, 82, 186, 304–5, 487n241, 491n284, 546n37; assassinated, 491n280 parks, 139, 170, 346, 439n3, 458n110, 498n337; China, 42; Japan, 1, 70, 124, 245–48, 284–86, 323–24, 326, 346, 406, 421, 423–24, 453n79, 477n168, 538nn88–89, 539n90, 566n118; Korea, 175, 287–91, 488n251, 489n253; Taiwan, 134, 178, 494n299, 508n105, 516n16 “Passing the Old Capital.” See Kwn Taeun pastoral, 21, 147, 451n69 Patel, Gieve (1940-), “On Killing a Tree” (1966), 153, 513n140 “Patent on Fortune.” See Yan Li “Peach Blossom Spring.” See Hoshi Shin’ichi Peanuts, 543n3 Peary, Robert, 559n102 P.E.N. Club. See International P.E.N. Congress “People and the Sea.” See Jia Fuxiang People of the Whale. See Linda Hogan Persian poetry, 80, 467n69 Perumal, Murugan (1968-), Seasons of the Palm (Koola Madari, 2000), 512n123 “Phaeton.” See Yamagishi Ryko Piaoliu. See Wang Lixiong “The Pigeons of Sngbuk-dong.” See Kim Kwangsp Pigeon Tuoli Is the Only Hope. See Chen Huang “Pigeon Tuoli, Part 1.” See Chen Huang “Pilding e kwanhan somun 3.” See Mun Tksu Pillow Book. See Sei Shnagon “Pimujang chidae.” See Yu Hynjong “Pi.” See Kim Chiha

Pippa Passes. See Robert Browning Pitch Dark: Stories Narrated by Female Miners. See Morisaki Kazue “Pittsburgh.” See Shang Qin “Pizibao.” See Shang Qin A Place in Space. See Gary Snyder The Place that Was Promised: Underground 2. See Murakami Haruki planetary consciousness, 23–26, 30–31, 53, 435, 448n58, 456n97, 457nn98, 103, 458n107 Please Look, Mr. Manager of the Calendar Factory. See Kim Hyesun People of the Valley. See Frank Waters A Persian Requiem: A Novel by Simin Daneshvar. See Simin Daneshvar phobia. See ecophobia