Man’yōshū

(“Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” “Collection for Ten Thousand Generations”)

(eighth century)

   The Man’yōshū is the oldest and, according to most critics, the greatest anthology of Japanese poetry. The ambiguous title may mean either “Collection of 10,000 Leaves [pages]” or “Collection for 10,000 Generations,” suggesting that the editors thought the huge collection (actually 4,516 poems) would stand for many ages. The exact date of its compilation is unknown, though the latest datable poem in the collection was written in 759. The final compiler of the collection is thought to have been Ōtomo Yakamochi, one of the poets best represented in the later pages of the anthology.

   According to some scholars, the impetus to form such a collection may have come from Japan’s attempts to “modernize” under the threat of Chinese invasion during the TANG DYNASTY. With the Taika Reform of 645–646, Japanese emperors were attempting to reform provincial government, taxation, and land tenure to weaken the power of local chieftains and create an absolute monarchy on the model of China. The fear was that unless Japan transformed itself along Chinese lines, the Tang emperors would view Japan as a barbarous state and engage in “civilizing” missions to the Japanese mainland, possibly including invasion. In 660, the Chinese invaded the kingdom of Paekche on the Korean Peninsula—an event that worked in Japan’s favor, since a number of Korean refugees fled to Japan, many of them well versed in Chinese learning. Some of these refugees became tutors for Japanese nobility, and this tutoring included conventions of Chinese poetry. One product of this influx of Chinese learning seems to have been the encouragement of the kind of poetry collected in the Man’yōshū.

   The Man’yōshū does contain a good number of earlier poems, though the time period from which most of the poetry comes is 600–759. The collection is divided into 20 books, arranged roughly chronologically, though some of the books have been organized by topic. But it is customary among critics to divide the collection according to four time periods. The earliest period includes poems that go as far back as the fifth century, and ends with poetry from the reign of Emperor Tenji (668–671). Some of the poems from this period are anonymous, but the poets named are all members of the highest nobility (such as Empress Kōgyoku or Emperor Tenji himself), possibly because only they were literate or cultured enough at the time to compose such poetry, or possibly because their importance led to their poems being preserved before any others. The second period of the Man’yōshū, from about 672 (the date of the Jinshin War) to 710 (the date the capital was moved to Nara), is dominated by a single major figure, Kakinomoto HITOMARO, one of Japan’s greatest poets. Hitomaro was court poet to Empress Jit ō, and writes poems that are often longer than others in the collection, dealing with a variety of both public and private topics. The third period includes the decades from 710 to 733 (the date of the poet Yamanoue no Okura’s death), and includes the largest number of important poets, such as Okura, Yamabe Akahito, and Otomo Tabito. Okura was known for incorporating Buddhist and Confucian elements in his poetry, under the influence of the Chinese. Tabito, under a similar influence, introduces Taoist elements. Only Akahito seems purely Japanese in outlook. The fourth and final period of the Man’yōshū includes the years between 733 and 759. This period is dominated by Yakamochi, the last important poet of the collection, and the one credited with the final compilation of the Man’yōshū.While some critics admire his poetry highly, many regard his productions as undistinguished by comparison with the other major poets in the collection. Nearly all of the poems in the Man’yōshū are CHŌKA (“long poems”) or TANKA (short poems). The chōka might be any length (though the longest in the Man’yōshū is 149 lines), and alternated lines of five and seven syllables, ending with a couplet of seven-syllable lines. The tanka was a poem of 31 syllables in five lines, falling into a pattern of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. The vast majority (4,207) of the poems in the collection are tanka, although the 265 chōka, particularly those of Hitomaro, tend to be the most admired poems in the collection.

   It is also customary to categorize poems in the collection by subject matter as zōka, sōmon, or banka. The zōka is a poem on a “miscellaneous” subject. The sōmon is a poem on personal or family concerns, like a love poem, or like Hitomaro’s chōka on leaving his wife as he traveled to the capital. A banka (the term literally means “coffin pulling song”) was a poem lamenting a death, and would include a number of Hitomaro’s poems concerning the deaths of members of the royal family. The poetry of the Man’yōshū is also characterized by three particular rhetorical devices. One of these is the makurakotoba (literally “pillowwords”): These were formulaic conventional epithets that were placed before words and modified them. The second device was called the jo or “preface.” This was generally a phrase at the beginning of a poem or section of a poem that connected with a later part of the poem figuratively or logically. The third device was the “binary measure”— a form of parallelism inspired by Chinese poetry and often involved formulaic phrases that paired spatial or temporal concepts like night and day, land and sea, or heaven and earth. Such rhetorical figures are generally lost in translation, but are part of the artistry of the poems of the Man’yōshū. Despite the profound influence of Chinese and Korean thought on the collection, many Japanese think of the Man’yōshū as the product of a pure Japanese culture. Certainly it is predominantly Shinto in its spiritual outlook, unlike later collections. It also includes some 2,000 anonymous poems, some of which seem to come from older folk traditions, or are written by poets outside the noble class, such as some purportedly by frontier guardsmen. But it seems likely that these have in general been rewritten or heavily edited by Yakamochi or other poet-editors. Perhaps the main thing that can be said of the Man’yōshū is that its enormous variety has given readers of all generations something to admire and to relate to, and has given subsequent generations of Japanese poets the forms and traditions that were to become the basis of Japanese verse.

   Bibliography

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

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

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

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