I’ve finished reading “The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom” (higanbana ga saku shima, 彼岸花が咲く島) by Li Kotomi 李琴峰, and it is one of the best novels I have read in a quite a while. I read it in Japanese as it has not been translated yet in any other language I can read.
It was a delight to read, especially after reading Yoko Tawada’s “The Last Children of Tokyo”/”The Emissary” (献灯使, kentōshi) which had been a real struggle for me. In fact, it was a relief as I had started to doubt my Japanese abilities. I don’t mean that Yoko Tawada’s novel is bad, not at all, but there are so many sentences that I had to read three times or more to get what they actually mean. By comparison, the writing in this novel is simple and transparent (only by comparison though). I still had to look up quite a few words, but that is actually fun
The novel has not been translated into English yet at the time of writing (July 2025). The title is translated on Li Kotomi’s web site as “The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom”. The Italian translation calls it “L’isola dei gigli rossi”, which simply means “The island of the red lilies”; the Polish title is “Wyspa pajęczych lilii” which is “The island of the spider lilies”.
What others have said
Despite not having been translated into English yet, there are beside Japanese ones quite a few reviews of and articles about the novel, because it won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in 2021.
I recommend in particular the very interesting essay by Anna Specchio, the Italian translator of the novel: “The Island where Future Possibilities Bloom. Language, gender, and identity issues in Li Kotomi’s Higanbana ga saku shima”. It is very comprehensive and covers many of the aspects that I comment on in this article, and many more that I don’t discuss, in particular issues of gender, patriarchy and imperialism, because I feel she did it so much better than I ever could.
Another interesting essay in Japanese is 在日台湾人作家李琴峰『彼岸花が咲く島』研究――アンチ国民国家論の政治的寓話 (“Research article: Taiwanese writer living in Japan Li Kotomi’s ‘The island where red spider lilies bloom’ – an anti-nationalist political allegory”) by Hsieh Hui-Chen 謝 惠貞, an associate professor in Comparative Study of Japanese and Taiwanese Literature at Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She discusses in depth the issues of anti-nationalism and gender but also in particular of the languages spoken on the island, with comparisons to the creole and pidgin languages of Taiwan and Okinawa.
The story
The story is almost a fairtale. It is told in a very gentle way, with a lot of eye for details of nature and sensitivity for human feelings and relationships. One day a girl of about fifteen is washed up on a sandy beach of an island so far from anywhere that this has not happened in living memory. She is found by another girl of the same age, Yona, who had come to the beach to pick higanbana, and is looked after by her and her parent, Sera who is a swordfish hunter. The girl has lost all but the vagues memories of her past. Yona gives her a new name, Umi.
When she’s better, Umi is brought before the the head priestess of the island. She gives her a stark choice: integrate into the island and become a priestess, or get thrown out. Umi has nowhere to go, and Yona also wants to become a priestess, so with Yona’s help Umi sets out to learn the language and the customs of the island and the skills required to be a priestess. She also gets to know a boy called Tatsu, who desperately wants to become a priest, but that is impossible as only women can attain the priesthood. Umi and Yona promise to Tatsu that, when they become priestesses, they will change the rules so that men can become priests and learn the secret history of the island.
Language in the novel
Japanese writing gives the author a possible unique flexibility. To start with there are three writing systems, so that words can be written in kanji, hiragana or katakana; words or letters can also be written in rōmaji (Latin alphabet), for example Ｔシャツ (T-shirt).
Then, for many words there is a variety of kanji that can be used to write them. For example, “to whisper” can be written as ささやく, 囁く or 私語く or even ササヤク. For many kanji, there are archaic versions that are also valid to use, for example 蛍 (ほたる, firefly) can be written using the older kanji 螢 which explicitly contains the kanji for fire (火).
Finally, there is a feature called furigana, small kana written next to a word in vertical writing or above it in horizontal writing. It is primarily used to provide the reader with the readings of less common kanji, but it is not limited to kana and can be used for translation or clarification of words with a non-obvious meaning. In that case it tends to be called ruby. It is often used to provide the kana name for a plant name written in kanji. Quite often, the two are unrelated. For example, crape myrtle is sarusuberi in Japanese, usually written サルスベリ; but the kanji writing is 百日紅 which literally means “a hundred days crimson”. So the ruby will provide the katakana name.
All those options result in different connotations and have a strong effect on the atmosphere of a novel. For example, the higanbana of the title could be written as ヒガンバナ, which is the “correct” way for plant names, ひがんばな which is more colloquial, 彼岸花 or 彼岸花 or in this novel also 彼岸花.
In this novel there are also a few examples of the opposite: there are two prayers, one written entirely in hiragana and another entirely in kanji, where the meaning is not clear at all, not even to Japanese native speakers, but there are no Ruby at all, nor any explanation in the text.
Three languages
The novel is a delight for lovers of the Japanese language. Apart from the dialogue, most of text is written in ordinary Japanese, but the characters speak three different variants of Japanese.
Umi speaks a language called hi no moto kotoba, written ひのもとことば. hi no moto means “the origin of the sun”, because from the perspective of China and Korea, Japan was to the East and so the land of the rising sun; it is an older name for Japan: 日の本 hi no moto became 日の本, nihon. The reason for the difference in pronunciation is relevant to the novel: many Japanese words are written in kanji, logographic characters taken over from the Chinese script. Most of them can be pronounced in two ways (called “readings). One pronunciation is the Japanese word, and the other goes back to the original Chinese sound of the character. For example, 本 can be pronounced moto (the Japanese word ) or hon (the Chinese character sound).
The people on the island speak what they call nihongo ニホン語 which means Japanese, “the language of Nihon”, but which is quite different from current Japanese. That they call it ニホン語 and not 日本語 is significant: they have forgotten about the country called 日本 and the word nihon is used purely phonetically, and therefore written in katakana.
The priestesses speak a language called jogo 女語, which means “women’s language” and is very close to Umi’s language.
The reason for these differences is that the through the island’s connection with Taiwan, its nihongo has adopted many Chinese loanwords, and tends to use the Chinese readings for the kanji. There are also words from the languages of the Ryūkyū islands (the group of islands between Japan and Taiwan, of which Okinawa is the largest and most well-known).
The Japanese language has gone the opposite way: in a move to get rid of both Chinese immigrants (in fact, of all “non-pure” Japanese) and Chinese cultural influences, kanji were banned, and Japanese readings of characters were promoted. In this way, 日本語 became ひのもとことば (wich can be written in current Japanese as 日の本言葉). The jogo spoken by the priestesses, and which they teach to the girls of the island, is very close to Umi’s hi no moto kotoba. It is an older form which in writing it still uses some kanji (which is very fortunate for the reader) and does not use as many English loanwords as the hi no moto kotoba.
kanji or no kanji ?
The elimination by the patriarchy of kanji in favour of kana is interesting. Until the Meiji era (early 20th century), women were not supposed to learn kanji. Boys learned Chinese and read Chinese literature but girls were expected to read in hiragana and to learn only a very limited number of very common kanji. The use of hiragana has long been considered feminine, it was even called “the woman’s hand” (女手). Conversely, for a long time women who were able to read and write Chinese characters were regarded as unfeminine. This is illustrated in the 11th-century Tale of Genji (which was written by a woman, in kana):
In women as in men, there is no one worse than the one who tries to display her scanty knowledge in full […] The very worst are the ones who scribble off Chinese characters at such a rate that they fill a good half of letters where they are most out of place, letters to other women […] She cannot of course intend it to be so, but the words read aloud seem muscular and unyielding, and in the end hopelessly mannered (trans. E. Seidensticker).
On the other hand, in the Meiji era there was a movement to eliminate kanji. In fact, there were several, some of which advocated the use of the Roman alphabet. Mori Arinori, the founder of Japan’s modern education system, even favoured dropping the Japanese language altogether for simplified English. His main motivation was nationalist: he was anti-Chinese and therefore anti-_kanji_. In the end, a reduced number of kanji was kept, but it shows the scenario in the novel is not as implausible as one might think.
I was worried that three languages would make the novel hard to read, but this was not really the case. Native readers of Japanese don’t know the Chinese loan words either so they need to be explained anyway; and the additional English loan words are easy to work out.
The noro
What I call priestess is in the novel called noro (ノロ). I thought at first it was a made-up word but I discovered in a paper about plants used during rituals that it is the term used on Okinawa and other Ryūkyū islands for those who can talk with the gods. And just like in the story, they wear white robes and white headbands. And apparently they are still exclusively women and even today men are still banned from entering certain sacred sites. The religion in the novel is a combination of elements from Buddhism and Shinto with some elements from beliefs from the Ryūkyū and Taiwan. The head priestess is the dainoro 大ノロ. (It could be ōnoro because 大 can be read as ō or dai but I think the people on the island are more likely to use the Chinese reading).
umi
The most common meaning of umi is”sea” or “ocean” (written 海 ) but the name of the character is written 宇実, purely for phonetic similarity. In fact, Yona wanted to write it 霧実 where 霧 means “spray” but for Umi that was too complicated so she went for 宇 which means “heaven”.
There is a scene in the novel where Umi, who only knows kana, is taught to write kanji by Yona:
With a black pen, Yona showed Umi how to write a character stroke by stroke. One of those densely black, square “Island” characters that Umi could not read. It started with a dot, dot, then a horizontal line drawn from left to right, from there a short sweeping stroke to the left, then again a horizontal line and another one, and finally a vertical line with a again small upward turn at the bottom. Just by piling up dots, lines, sweeps and little hooks, a complete character was created. Umi scrutinised it curiously. “This is the ‘U’ in ‘Umi’,” Yona said. “Let’s see if you can write it!”
The character in question is 宇. I love this scene as it takes me back to when I first started to learn kanji. I never learned to write them properly by hand though.
yona
Yona’s name is interesting too. It is written 游娜 where the first character means to float or swim and the second means graceful. But it is also a reference to the island of Yonaguni, in kanji 与那国島. Note the presence of the 那 in 娜. This the island of the Ryūkyū archipelago that is furthest from Japan and very close to Taiwan; it is part of Japan. It has its own language (sadly now highly endangered) and a fascinating history, for example it was long rumoured to be a women’s island, and it was at least part of the inspiration of this novel. Even the map of the island in the novel is close to the map of the actual island.
The kamiuta
There is an enigmatic prayer (kamiuta 神歌, song to the gods) in the novel, written in hiragana only and in the language of the island, with lots of Chinese loan words. The kanji are based on a discussion I found on line.
かんぬみち だかいせよ
だかいしたゆえ かみほあひ
やまいのま うみわたれ
わたりしたゆえ たみげんこん
おおぐにびと たいきょせ
たいきょしたゆえ しまばんに
うみのなみ たつなかれ
しずまりしたゆえ ぎょふびんあん
いねのほよ よくみのれ
みのりしたゆえ だじゃふうず
The queen of heaven
There is a shrine on the island (called by their Okinawan name utaki 御嶽) which looks like a Chinese temple. Yona calls the temple 天后宮. It is dedicated to Tenhō, a goddess who protects seafarers. The name means Queen (or Empress) of Heaven; in Japanese it’s pronounced Tenkō. On the pillars of the gates are the following prayers, written in kanji only.
天道本慈仁航渡群黎登聖域
后恩施沛澤善導赤子醒迷津
Umi can’t read them at all, and that is of course the point. These exact phrases are also written on the pillars of the Tianhou Temple (tiānhòugōng) in Guanshan, Taiwan. So they are in an archaic Chinese.
I also found a Japanese site providing a reading for the characters:
天道慈仁を本として航で渡り群黎聖域に登る
后沛澤に恩を施善導て赤子迷津より醒
I got help from several people for the meaning of the phrases.
天道本慈仁、航渡群黎登圣域。
天道本慈仁 : The heavenly way is inherently compassionate and benevolent.”
航渡群黎登圣域: “She ferries the masses to the sacred realm.”
Overall meaning: The inherent nature of heaven is compassionate; through this benevolent guidance, people are helped across difficulties and elevated to a realm of spiritual enlightenment.
后恩施沛泽、善导赤子醒迷津。
后恩施沛泽: The Queen’s divine grace showers abundant blessings.
善导赤子醒迷津: She guides the innocent, awakening them from confusion.
Overall meaning: Divine grace is profound and abundant, nurturing all like timely rain. The deity guides humanity like a compassionate mother guiding her children away from confusion and toward clarity.
The deity Tenhō is also called Mazu 媽祖, and is a still widely revered sea goddess, protector of seafarers, originating from Putian in China. By pure coincidence, my PhD student Shuxuan Li is from that town and he kindly helped me out with those phrases.
From some people on fedi I learned that there is quite a bit word-play in these phrases. First, they start with 天 and 后 because it’s about 天后; then, 澤 in 沛澤 and 津 in 迷津 are all water-related characters, because Mazu is the goddess of sea.
In particular, 沛澤 “abundant divine grace” is a metaphor for Mazu’s protective and nurturing powers, echoing the imagery of life-giving water, often used to describe Heaven’s or a deity’s virtue. 泽 means “rain” and 沛 means marsh but here it means “abundant” because rain makes all creatures. 天道 means “The heavenly way” but refers here specifically to the Heavenly Mother Mazu.
Plants
What I like in particular is the frequent mentioning of plants and their names, and also that they are often written in kanji, although the customary way to write plant names in Japanese is in katakana.
The island where the story takes place is subtropical, and throughout the novel many local plants are mentioned. So after a fashion, you can tell the story through the plants. But it is really just an excuse to geek out on Japanese plant names.
higanbana
The titular flower, the higanbana, 彼岸花, is called Red Spider Lily or Cluster Amaryllis (Lycoris radiata). I don’t like the name “Spider Lily”, I feel it does the flower a discourtesy; although in the novel the petals are compared to a spider’s legs, which I take to be a nod to the English name. The other name, “Cluster Amaryllis”, is better but sounds very “botanical”.
The Japanese word higanbana refers to the period of higan. The term is derived from the Sanskrit pāram and means something like “crossing to the further bank”, with the notion of a river separating this world from nirvana. It is the name for the Buddhist rites held in the week around the autumn equinox, and this is also the period when those flowers bloom in Japan, so Equinox Flower would be a good name.
But the variety on the island blooms year round and has medicinal properties. The people on the island call it bianbanaa ビアンバナー which seems a combination of Mandarin bǐ’ànhuā and higanbana. It is interesting that the euphemism for dying used on the island, gueki 過去 , from the Chinese guòqù, means “crossing to the other bank” (mukōgishi e wataru 向こう岸へ渡る ). In Japanese, 過去 is pronounced kago and means “the past” or “one’s past life”; 過ぎ去る which is the same as 過去する means “to pass”, but it is not used as a euphemism for dying.
Other medicinal plants
The noro act as healers, and the higanbana are primarily medicinal. Other medicinal plants mentioned are jieju ジエジュ for which I have not found a Japanese or Chinese name; nishiyomogi (西蓬) Indian wormwood (Artemisia indica) and kaininsou (海人草) red seabroom (Digenea simplex), a seaweed with medicinal properties. Yona uses them to help Umi get better after she finds her on the beach, and also later when she gets some infection on her hand after being tatooed. Umi dislikes the bitter taste of the nishiyomogi soup.
Play
There is a scene in the story where Yona and Uma have a play-fight with burrs, prickly seedheads that stick to hair and clothes. The scene establishes the rapport between them and the attraction Umi feels for Yona.
The burrs are called hittsukimushi (引っ付き虫, literally “sticking bugs”) in Japanese. The plant has a wonderful name: tachiawayukisendangusa (立泡雪栴檀草). The 立, tachi, means it’s a tall plant; 泡雪 (als 淡雪 ), awayuki, means “light snow”; 栴檀草 means sendangusa where the 草 means grass; the other kanji each represent a kind of tree, but there is no translation for the compound. It has many English common names (more than twenty); I like “butterfly needles” and “bur marigold”. The official name is Bidens pilosa var. radiata.
Rituals
The noro use branches of haibyakushin (這柏槇) dwarf Japanese garden juniper (Juniperus chinensis var. procumbens) as shrine offerings, and the leaves of the bochōji (母丁字), also known as Ryūkyū-aoki (琉球青木) and in English “wild coffee” (Psychotria asiatica), are used to make charms against evil spirits. The charms and offerings are a recurrent theme in the novel.
Vegetation
Many trees are mentioned throughout, in particular gajumaru (榕樹 ), the Chinese banyan tree (Ficus microcarpa) and birō 蒲葵
There is a nice scene describing the headlands and clifftops, with a lot of detail of the vegetation: susuki (芒) Japanese pampas grass (Miscanthus sinensis) and chigaya (茅) Cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica), shimahigeshiba (島髭芝) purpletop chloris (Chloris barbata), sunadzuru (砂蔓）love-vine（Cassytha filiformis), teppōyuri (鉄砲百合), Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum), santanka (山丹花) Chinese ixora (Ixora chinensis), sotetsu (蘇鉄 ) Japanese sago palm (Cycas revoluta) and adan (阿檀) umbrella tree (Pandanus odorifer). The latter grows in particular on the lip of a deep chasm rent into the top of the headland, where there is a small shrine with a jizō statue.
More plants are mentioned during Umi and Yona’s visit to the most remote and sacred shrine on the island, for which they have to walk a narrow mountain path through the rainforest. Apart from gajumaru and birō, in those mountain woods also grow tokusaba-mokumaō (砥草葉木麻黄), ironwood (Casuarina equisetifolia) — the first part of the Japanese name, tokusaba means “sharp grass leaves”, which is also the name for the common horsetail, and this is reflected in the latin name: equisetifolia means “with leaves like the horsetail”; madake (真竹) Japanese timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambsoides) or giant bamboo, satō-natsumeyashi (砂糖棗椰子) date palm (Phoenix dactylifera); the satō here means sugar; usually it is called just natsumeyashi, where natsume is date and yashi palm.
A very special tree in the story is a huge akagi (赤木), which means “redwood” but the English name is Bishop wood (Bischofia javanica). The akagi is the location of the shrine, it is so big that five men holding hands can’t surround it. It’s very old and overgrown, in particular with ferns like hōbikanju (鳳尾貫衆) giant swordfern (Nephrolepis biserrata) — hōbi 鳳尾 means firebird tail; and hoshida (穂羊歯) Japanese maiden fern (Thelypteris acuminata), but very much alive.
Food plants
Apart from farm plants like rice, sweet potato (satsumaimo サツマイモ), taro (taroimo タロイモ) and satōkibi (砂糖黍) sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), also called kansho (甘蔗); and garden plants yomogi (蓬) Japanese mugwort (Artemisia princeps), botanbōfū (牡丹防風) coastal hog fennel (Peucedanum japonicum) and hōsenka (鳳仙花) garden balsam (Impatiens balsamina), which are used in side dishes and in the island’s version of onigiri rice balls, fantan (飯団, from the Chinese fàntuán·zi), other food plants mentioned in the novel are rōzeru (ローゼル), roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) which is drunk as tea (Umi doesn’t like it); mangō (芒果) mango (Mangifera indica) which they eat after the hittsukimushi fight and which apparently simply grows there in the wild.
Conditions for Utopia
The society on the island is not quite an Utopia, it is not perfect, but it is an utopian experiment similar to that in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”. It struck me that such an experiment can only work in two situations. Either the utopian society is dominant, or at least equally powerful as its peers. This is the situation of the Culture in Iain M Banks’s novels. Or it should be isolated from the other, more powerful societies, and that is what we see with the island and also in “The Dispossessed”. In a perfect Utopia, presumably the isolation would be complete; in the imperfect ones there is some degree on interaction. There is in principle a third situation possible: the dominant society could simply not care about the utopia, even if it is very close. I think that rather unlikely because the utopian society would attract people and would also hold up a mirror to the other society showing its deficiencies. And even though the government of the dominant society could not care, it’s enterprising citizens would look for ways to benefit from interactions with the utopia, for example resource extraction.
The words “powerful” and “dominant” need some consideration. This is not necessarily about military or economic power or size. A society can also be culturally or technologically dominant. The isolation therefore must also be in terms of information exchange.
Suppose Scotland was a Utopia along the lines of the island: no money, collective ownership, no police or army, low-tech but with frugal abundance. Then unless there was a closed border and a communication barrier, its proximity to England would result in a strong influence in many respects: some English entrepeneurs would attempt to extract resources, which would lead to conflict; others would attempt trade and as a result, soon the concept of money would be introduced; they could easily trade communication technology which would lead to pushing the English cultural values; introduction of advanced technologically would also undermine the Utopia’s foundations. All of this would happen even if there is no malicious intent. English people would likely desire to settle in large numbers in a Utopian Scotland. If the influx was too large, there would be insufficient scope for integration. Therefore, to maintain the Utopia, isolation is necessary. Ironically, this is also the case for more dolorous regimes, which explains the Iron Curtain and the Hermit Kingdom.
The question is why Taiwan, China and Japan tolerate the island. From the context of the novel, it has to be assumed that the island is not very far from Taiwan but is Japanese territory (like the real-world Yonaguni). That explains why China and Taiwan could not interfere easily. I assume the story is set in the near future, but in principle it could an alternate timeline in which case it could be in the recent past. In either case, Japan must be aware of the existence of the island. Maybe the Japanese authorities consider it preferable to ignore the island as not doing so could lead to all kinds of complications. But it is clear that the future existence of the island in its utopian state is quite fragile.
the banner shows a higanbana with a swallowtail butterfly on it