The works of Ishimure Michiko, Hayashi Fumiko, and Osaki Midori feature characters who learn to experience the liveliness of the environment around them—a phenomenon that Deborah Rose Bird calls “the shimmer.” The shimmer occasions a fundamental change in these characters that allows for new ways of inhabiting the world. As they wrote of this shimmer, all three writers explored the tension between a measurable, scientific view of the environment and an immeasurable, poetic view of the environment that does not separate nature and culture. Their works teach us how to read for the environment in literature that may not appear environmental at first glance.

Introduction

Growing interest in the environmental humanities has created an opportunity to introduce readers to environmental writers and works of environmental literature. It has also created an opening to allow us to read for the environment in works of literature that may not appear environmental at first glance. This essay takes up three women writers of modern Japan— one whose work is virtually always discussed in terms of the environment (Ishimure Michiko, 1927–2018), one whose work is well known and regularly included in survey courses of Japanese literature but rarely discussed as environmental (Hayashi Fumiko, 1903–1951), and one whose work is rarely discussed at all (Osaki Midori, 1896–1971)—and proposes that each one is an environmental writer.

This claim is possible if we take seriously a question posed in Ishimure’s 1997 novel Tenko (Lake of Heaven*). Lake of Heaven narrates the journey of a young man to a remote rural region of Kyushu that was once home to his deceased grandfather. He hopes to scatter his grandfather’s ashes in his ancestral village but finds it submerged under water. As the story unfolds, protagonist Masahiko, who has grown up in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, learns how to see, hear, and feel the world differently. Everything around him becomes overwhelmingly vibrant and newly alive. The narrator asks a question directed equally to Masahiko and to the reader: “if you were really aware of all the life that’s teeming about the earth, what might you see?” (Ishimure 2008, 207).