Rethinking Life Through Decomposition

In a thought-provoking talk on December 4th, Shiho Satsuka explored how matsutake mushrooms inspire new social relations, environmental practices, and planetary philosophies, drawing on her ongoing book project.

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Matsutake mushrooms have long held cultural, economic, and ecological significance in Japan. The high demand for matsutake stems from layered histories. The fuel revolution and mass migration in post-WWII Japan endangered village forests (satoyama), which provided habitats for matsutake and had been sustained by human activities. As these forests deteriorated, matsutake harvests dwindled, leading to an increased reliance on imports from overseas and stretching the matsutake-foraging economies globally.

Satsuka noted that matsutake’s enigmatic life processes—impossible to reproduce scientifically despite numerous attempts to harness their market value—position them as both a natural and cultural gift, which prompts critical reflections on human exceptionalism, industrial extractivism, and technological optimism across disciplinary and regional boundaries.

Central to Professor Satsuka's talk was the concept of “decomposition.” Drawing on Japanese historian Tatsushi Fujihara’s The Philosophy of Decomposition, Satsuka emphasized how taking decomposition as the core of relationality enables us to move beyond life-death binaries and appreciate how matsutakes embody liveliness and interconnectedness outside mechanistic views of ecosystems. Decomposition further allows us to imagine what she calls “new commons” as spaces of coexistence, beyond conventional studies of commons that tend to regard nature as a sum of resources to be managed and extracted.

Using examples from her ongoing fieldwork in satoyama forest revitalization movements in Kyoto, she described how her interlocutors have engaged with forest conditioning for over a decade through diverse activities—selling firewood, creating chainsaw art, composting, and gardening—in their efforts to bring matsutake back to the forests. While these activities have indeed led to some matsutake blossoming, Satsuka highlighted that what sustains these efforts is now the village forest itself, which is enjoyed by the participants as a space for experiencing social and ecological connections.

This “new commons,” she argued, resists extraction-driven industrial models and the tragedy-of-the-commons narrative, fostering sustainable ecologies and joyful socialities among fungi, trees, people, and more. Satsuka emphasized that these efforts to cultivate new commons are far from nostalgic in their relationship to time. Rather, they are forward-looking, aiming to undo colonial and industrial legacies while grappling with “how to bring about the extinction of empire” while grappling to “learn from symbiotic relations” of decomposition—between matsutakes and its others such as pine trees. The future of more-than-human coexistence, she concluded, may be hidden somewhere in these worlds of re-worlding that matsutakes help open up.