A monk reads sutras alone at night, lamp lit. A woman comes to the door and asks a strange question: can a plant without a mind still reach Buddhahood? This is bashō no sei — 芭蕉 (bashō), the banana plant, and 精 (sei), its living spirit. The idea came from China. In Japan, its strongest folk stories come from the Ryukyu Islands.
What does it look like?
Bashō no sei shows itself in human shape. In the Chinese tale, the Noh play and the Shinshū story, it is a woman. In Ryukyu accounts, night travelers met strange, unearthly figures in the groves. It appears at night.
A plant with a hidden human side is not unique to this spirit. Ninmenju, a tree said to grow human-faced fruit, carries a similar idea. So does kodama, the spirit an old tree gains simply by living long enough. Bashō no sei belongs to that same family: a plant old enough, and left alone long enough, to grow something like a mind.
The banana groves of Okinawa
In the Ryukyu Islands, banana plants were once grown in wide, closely packed groves. The Edo-period naturalist Satō Chūryō recorded accounts of these groves in his essays, Chūryō Manroku. He wrote of strange figures seen there at night, and of a standing warning: women should not walk through a banana grove after dark.
His account goes further. A woman who broke the rule might become pregnant by the spirit. The child, he wrote, was born with demon features and fangs. Families kept powdered kumazasa, a bamboo grass, to kill such a newborn.
How to keep it away
One piece of advice appears in the old accounts: carry a blade near banana plants at night. A story from Shinshū, the old name for Nagano, explains why that advice made sense to the people who followed it.
A monk reading alone at night is visited by a beautiful woman. Suspicious of her, he strikes at her with a small blade. She flees. He follows her trail of blood into the garden. There he finds a banana plant cut through. The woman had been the plant all along.
Where it comes from
Toriyama Sekien drew bashō no sei for his 1781 collection Konjaku Hyakki Shūi, and he traced the idea back to China. His note says China has tales of a banana spirit taking human shape. Scholars trace one to a Yuan-dynasty book of strange stories. There, the spirit questions monks about enlightenment.
The same story became a Noh play, simply titled Bashō. In it, a spirit in a woman's form visits a monk who is chanting sutras at night. She puts a real question from Buddhist teaching to him: can a plant, which has no mind of its own, still reach enlightenment? The idea has a name, sōmoku jōbutsu, the belief that plants can awaken too. A woman asked a monk if a plant could reach enlightenment. She was the plant.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Basho no Sei in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1781). This book has that picture, with its caption in English.
- Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien →trans. Hiroko Yoda & Matt AltThe complete Edo-period bestiaries that so many of these entries trace back to, in full English translation.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
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Bashō no sei today
The Noh play Bashō is still performed today, one of the stranger entries in a repertoire built mostly around ghosts and warriors. Its author, Konparu Zenchiku, set it in China.
