Nature in Verse and Print

Ecocriticism emerged in the United States in the 1990s and, despite its global growth, still largely privileges Western epistemologies of “nature,” often defined against culture. This article contributes a reframing by turning to Edo-period Japan and its worldview later articulated as shizen — the “self-so” unfolding of phenomena that includes cultivated and inhabited spaces — to reframe how human–nonhuman relations can be read. Through close readings of selected haiku and ukiyo-e, I show how seasonal motifs and conventional devices (e.g., kigo, hon’i) operated within social, performative contexts while also cultivating attentiveness to the more-than-human world. Rather than treating plants, animals, and weather as neutral contexts or mere metaphors, these works stage dual relationality: they mediate encounters between humans and nonhumans and simultaneously enact bonds among human actors (poets, hosts, viewers, patrons). To theorize this doubleness, I bring mono-no-aware, a cultivated sensitivity to impermanence, into dialogue with Spinoza’s affect theory by arguing that poems and prints function as affective events that recalibrate what bodies can perceive and do. The goal is not to claim Edo art as proto-environmentalist, but to pluralize ecocritical method by holding cultural coding and ecological perception together. Read through shizen, haiku and ukiyo-e model situated practices of attention that unsettle nature/culture binaries and expand ecocriticism beyond its Anglo-European foundations.