This thoughtful book will make you look at the wonders of trees anew

Aya Koda, who died in 1990, was a Japanese writer and the daughter of a famous author, Rohan Koda. One of her last books was Tree, an account of her journeys to visit famous trees around Japan. It has recently been published in English for the first time, translated by Charlotte Goff.

“Trees go through life without saying a word,” Koda writes. “They say nothing, even if the path of their life is curved. It’s wonderful, I thought, and sad.”

Tree is full of these sorts of asides, but the effect isn’t one of tweeness – it is a thoughtful and thought-provoking account of her encounters with trees, one that you feel only someone towards the end of their life could achieve. The book is written in a genre of Japanese literature called zuihitsu, which means “following the brush”. It is a style that encourages musing and spontaneity, without much need for a plot. There is a lightness to her writing, almost a casualness, but also a wonderful originality, and always a fresh perspective.

Koda’s frailty (sometimes she is carried by a guide up a mountain or through a forest to meet the tree she is after) frequently contrasts with the strength of her subjects. Often, she is younger than the tree she meets, as when she visits Jōmon Sugi, a legendary cypress tree growing on Yakushima Island in the south of Japan. This species (Cryptomeria japonica) is sometimes called Japanese redwood; Jōmon Sugi is at least 2000 years old, though some estimates put it at 7000 years old. “If I am completely honest, I was afraid,” Koda writes of her encounter.

On another trip, she is taken to the famous Jindai-zakura, a 2000-year-old cherry tree, thought to be Japan’s oldest such tree. She writes beautifully of the incredibly gnarled, ancient roots and bark, and the delicate, transient flowers: “I felt as though I had been caught in a pincer movement of beauty and terror.” Of another famous ancient cherry tree, Miharu Takizakura, in Fukushima, she captures a sense of its great age: “What seems to happen is that all the generations of the tree live right alongside one another,” she writes. “In this one tree, great, great, great grandparents and even ancestors from long, long before them were living inside one body.”

Many people have come to Tree after it was featured in Wim Wenders’s 2024 film Perfect Days (which I also highly recommend). Read it and look at trees anew.

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