Kakinomoto no Hitomaro

(Hitomaro)

(fl. 689–700)

   The acknowledged genius of the huge eighth-century Japanese poetry anthology called the MAN’YŌSHŪ, the court poet Hitomaro, as he is familiarly known, is widely regarded as master of the verse form called the chōka, or “long poem.” The Man’yōshū contains 19 chōka and about 75 short poems (the 31-syllable tanka) directly attributed to Hitomaro. A number of the tanka, as was customary, function as envois (or hanka) appended to the longer chōka. There are, in addition, some 380 other poems in the collection, mostly tanka, that are said to derive from something called the Hitomaro Kashū (Hitomaro poem collection), but it is unclear how many of these poems are actually his (some are demonstrably not written by him) or what the relationship of these poems is to the poet.

   Virtually nothing is known of Hitomaro’s life, and no contemporary references to him exist outside of the headnotes to his poems in the Man’yōshū. It seems probable that he was a court official of minor status, without any real power or authority, and not significant enough to appear in any official histories of his time. Although in his society, anyone associated with the court was expected to be able to compose a short poem on occasion, Hitomaro was more of an official court poet. He may have been active during the reign of the emperor Temmu (672–686), but seems to have been essentially poet laureate for his widow, the empress Jitō, who officially reigned from 686 to 696, though she kept real power until her death in 702. Hitomaro documents the great events of Jitō’s reign, whether a grand imperial procession to Yoshino or some other site, or the death of some member of the royal family.His earliest datable poem is a lament on the death of Prince Kusakabe in 689, while his latest is another lament, this time for the princess Asuka, written in 700. Hitomaro’s devotion to the imperial family was deep, sincere, and religious. Many of his poems begin with a formula proclaiming the sovereignty and divinity of the empress, and his lament for Prince Kusakabe begins with an account of the divine ancestry of the imperial family, a tenet of the Shinto religion. It has been observed that Hitomaro’s poetry is uniformly Shinto in its worldview, and does not evince any overt influence of the Buddhism that was becoming more prevalent in Japan during his lifetime. One can, however, see in several of his poems a general conviction of the impermanence of the physical world, a sentiment that might be borrowed from Buddhism.

   It is customary to divide Hitomaro’s poems into two categories: the “public poems,” that he wrote in his role as court poet, and the “private poems” in which he deals with more personal and intimate moments. The most acclaimed of Hitomaro’s public poems (and the longest poem in the Man’yōshū at 149 lines) is his chōka “Following the temporary enshrinement of Prince Takechi,” who had died in 696 at the age of 42. Takechi had made his reputation fighting the Jinshin War in 672 for his father, the emperor Temmu. Afterward he was made prime minister and designated crown prince during the reign of his mother, the empress Jitō. The poem opens with a praise of the emperor Temmu, and ends with a description of the great palace that Prince Takechi had built on Mount Kagu, suggesting that although Takechi was gone, his works— like the palace—would live on. The central section of the poem is a stirring description of the battle in which Takechi made his reputation. It is unique in medieval Japanese poetry in its prolonged description of the battle, and proceeds generally by the depiction of basic human emotions amid highly visual images in the form of similes, as in these lines:

   Frightful to hear was the bow-strings’ clang,

   Like a whirlwind sweeping

   Through a winter forest of snow.

   And like snow-flakes tempest-driven

   The arrows fell thick and fast.

   (Nippon Gakujutsu Sinkōkai 1965, 40)

   It is Hitomaro’s private poems, however, that are most admired today, largely because of their elegant expression of universal human emotion. Among these is his famous poem on abandoning his wife in Iwami while leaving for the capital, expressing the profound loneliness of the parting in a famous image of tangled seaweed that he sees upon a rocky strand as he leaves. The image becomes for him the image of his love:

   Like the sea-tangle, swaying in the wave

   Hither and thither, my wife would cling to me,

   As she lay by my side.

   (Nippon Gakujutsu Sinkōkai 1965, 32)

   But left without him, he visualizes his wife not as tangled seaweed but as sagging, dry grass:

   My wife must be languishing

   Like drooping summer grass.

   (Nippon Gakujutsu Sinkōkai 1965, 32)

   Hitomaro’s other well-known chōka include two poems on his wife’s death, a contemplative poem on the transience of earthly glory inspired by his view of the ruined capital of Ōmi, and a complex poem on seeing the body of a man shipwrecked on the island of Samine that ends with sympathy for the man’s wife who does not know he is dead.

   While English readers of Hitomaro may appreciate his vivid depictions of the human condition, Hitomaro’s technical mastery is impossible to translate. He is famous for his effective use of makurakotoba (literally “pillow-words”), or conventional epithets: These were often figurative words or phrases with conventionally fixed meanings, that modified the following word, such as chihayaburu (“mighty they are”) for the gods, or shirotae no (“of white bark cloth or hemp”) to modify “sleeves” (Miner, et al., 1985, 288). Hitomaro uses these with imagination, rather than simply mechanically as many other poets had before him, and he seems to have coined or at least altered half the pillow-words that he used.He also makes extensive use of what were technically called jo (prefaces)—these were lines early in a poem that foreshadowed later images or ideas— either by sound, by simile, or by logical connection (Miner, et al., 1985, 279). Further, Hitomaro uses parallelism and refrain as well as complex or ambiguous sentence structure to give his poetry a technical brilliance unknown before him and emulated afterward.

   Within a few generations of his death, Hitomaro was revered as a legendary, semi-divine personage, called in the preface to the KOKINSHU (ca. 905) the “sage of poetry.” So admired was he that one reason the circumstances of his life are so uncertain is that for centuries, his admirers guarded details like the supposed place of his birth as secrets known to only a few intimates. Hitomaro remains one of the greatest of Japanese poets, and one of the few with a worldwide reputation.

   Bibliography

   ■ Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. A History of Japanese Literature, 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

   ■ Levy, Ian Hideo. Hitomaro and the Birth of Japanese Lyricism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

   ■ Miner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell. The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

   ■ Nipon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, trans. The Manyoshu. With a new foreword by Donald Keene. 1940.New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.