Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Through the lens of critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines Japanese writers' and filmmakers' engagement with plants, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.

Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors, and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.