Man'yōshū

The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in a series of compilers, is today widely believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi, although numerous other theories have been proposed. The chronologically last datable poem in the collection is from AD 759 ( 4516). It contains many poems from a much earlier period, with the bulk of the collection representing the period between AD 600 and 759. The precise significance of the title is not known with certainty.

The comprises more than 4,500 poems in 20 volumes, and is broadly divided into three genres: , songs at banquets and trips; , songs about love between men and women; and , songs to mourn the death of people. These songs were written by people of various statuses, such as the Emperor, aristocrats, junior officials, soldiers ( songs), street performers, peasants, and folk songs (Eastern songs). There are more than 2,100 poems by unknown authors.

The collection is divided into 20 parts or books; this number was followed in most later collections. The collection contains 265 (long poems), 4,207 (short poems), one (short connecting poem), one (a poem in the form 5-7-5-7-7-7; named for the poems inscribed on the Buddha's footprints at Yakushi-ji in Nara), four (Chinese poems), and 22 Chinese prose passages. Unlike later collections, such as the , there is no preface.

The is widely regarded as being a particularly unique Japanese work, though its poems and passages did not differ starkly from its contemporaneous (for Yakamochi's time) scholarly standard of Chinese literature and poetics; many entries of the have a continental tone, earlier poems having Confucian or Taoist themes and later poems reflecting on Buddhist teachings. However, the is considered singular, even in comparison with later works, in choosing primarily Ancient Japanese themes, extolling Shintō virtues of and . In addition, the language of many entries of the exerts a powerful sentimental appeal to readers:

The compilation of the also preserves the names of earlier Japanese poetic compilations, these being the , several texts called the , as well as at least four family or individual anthologies known as belonging to Kakimoto no Hitomaro, Kasa no Kanamura, Takahashi no Mushimaro and Tanabe no Sakimaro.

Name

The literal translation of the kanji that make up the title () is "ten thousand — leaves — collection".

The principal interpretations of this name, according to the 20th century scholar , are:

# A book that collects a great many poems;
# A book for all generations; and:
# A poetry collection that uses a large volume of paper.

Of these, supporters of the first interpretation can be further divided into:

# Those who interpret the middle character as "words" " 言の葉" (, lit. "leaves of speech"), thus giving "ten thousand words", i.e. "many ", including Sengaku, , Kada no Azumamaro and Kamo no Mabuchi, and;
# Those who interpret the middle character as literally referring to leaves of a tree, but as a metaphor for poems, including Ueda Akinari, , , , and Susumu Nakanishi.

Furthermore, supporters of the second interpretation of the name can be divided into:

# It was meant to express the intention that the work should last for all time (proposed by Keichū, and supported by , , Yoshio Yamada, and );
# It was meant to wish for long life for the emperor and empress ();
# It was meant to indicate that the collection included poems from all ages (proposed by Yamada).

The third interpretation of the name - that it refers to a poetry collection that uses a large quantity of paper - was proposed by Yūkichi Takeda in his , but Takeda also accepted the second interpretation; his theory that the title refers to the large volume of paper used in the collection has not gained much traction among other scholars.

Periodization

The collection is customarily divided into four periods. The earliest dates to prehistoric or legendary pasts, from the time of Emperor Yūryaku (  – ) to those of the little-documented Emperor Yōmei (r. 585–587), Saimei (r. 642-645, 655-661), and finally Tenji (r. 668–671) during the Taika Reforms and the time of Fujiwara no Kamatari (614–669). The second period covers the end of the 7th century, coinciding with the popularity of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, one of Japan's greatest poets. The third period spans 700 – and covers the works of such poets as Yamabe no Akahito, Ōtomo no Tabito and Yamanoue no Okura. The fourth period spans 730–760 and includes the work of the last great poet of this collection, the compiler Ōtomo no Yakamochi himself, who not only wrote many original poems but also edited, updated and refashioned an unknown number of ancient poems.

Poets

The vast majority of the poems of the were composed over a period of roughly a century, with scholars assigning the major poets of the collection to one or another of the four "periods" discussed above. Princess Nukata's poetry is included in that of the first period (645–672), while the second period (673–701) is represented by the poetry of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, generally regarded as the greatest of poets and one of the most important poets in Japanese history. The third period (702–729) includes the poems of Takechi no Kurohito, whom Donald Keene called " e only new poet of importance" of the early part of this period, when Fujiwara no Fuhito promoted the composition of (poetry in classical Chinese). Other "third period" poets include: Yamabe no Akahito, a poet who was once paired with Hitomaro but whose reputation has suffered in modern times; Takahashi no Mushimaro, one of the last great poets, who recorded a number of Japanese legends such as that of Ura no Shimako; and Kasa no Kanamura, a high-ranking courtier who also composed but not as well as Hitomaro or Mushimaro. But the most prominent and important poets of the third period were Ōtomo no Tabito, Yakamochi's father and the head of a poetic circle in the Dazaifu, and Tabito's friend Yamanoue no Okura, possibly an immigrant from the Korean kingdom of Paekche, whose poetry is highly idiosyncratic in both its language and subject matter and has been highly praised in modern times. Yakamochi himself was a poet of the fourth period (730–759), and according to Keene he "dominated" this period. He composed the last dated poem of the anthology in 759.

Linguistic significance

In addition to its artistic merits, the is significant for using the earliest Japanese writing system, the cumbersome . Though it was by no means the first use of this writing system—which was used to compose the (712),, cited in —it was influential enough to give the writing system its modern name, as means "the of the ". This system uses Chinese characters in a variety of functions: logographically to represent Japanese words, phonetically to represent Japanese sounds, and frequently in a combination of these. Such usage of Chinese characters to phonetically represent Japanese syllables eventually led to the birth of , as they were created from simplified cursive forms () and fragments () of .

Like the majority of surviving Old Japanese literature, the vast majority of the is written in Western Old Japanese, the dialect of the capital region around Kyoto and Nara. However, specific parts of the collection, particularly volumes 14 and 20, are also highly valued by historical linguists for the information they provide on other Old Japanese dialects, as these volumes collectively contain over 300 poems from the Azuma provinces of eastern Japan—what is now the regions of Chūbu, Kanto, and southern Tōhoku.

Translations

Julius Klaproth produced some early, severely flawed translations of poetry. Donald Keene explained in a preface to the Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkō Kai edition of the :

In 1940, Columbia University Press published a translation created by a committee of Japanese scholars and revised by the English poet, Ralph Hodgson. This translation was accepted in the Japanese Translation Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Dutch scholar Jan L. Pierson completed an English translation of the Man'yōshū between 1929 and 1963, although this is described by Alexander Vovin as "seriously outdated" due to Pierson having "ignored or misunderstood many facts of Old Japanese grammar and phonology" which had been established in the 20th century. Japanese scholars Honda Heihachiro (1967) and Suga Teruo (1991) both produced complete literary translations into English, with the former using rhymed iambic feet and preserving the 31-syllable count of tanka and the latter preserving the 5-7 pattern of syllables in each line. Ian Hideo Levy published the first of what was intended to be a four volume English translation in 1981 for which he received the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

In 2009, Alexander Vovin published the first volume of his English translation of the ''Man'yōshū'', including commentaries, the original text, and translations of the prose elements in-between poems. He completed, in order, volumes 15, 5, 14, 20, 17, 18, 1, 19, 2, and 16 before his death in 2022, with volume 10 set to be released posthumously.

In premodern Japan, officials used wooden slips or tablets of various sizes, known as , for recording memoranda, simple correspondence, and official dispatches. Three that have been excavated contain text from the . A excavated in Kizugawa, Kyoto, contains the first 11 characters of poem 2205 from volume 10, written in . It is dated between 750 and 780, and its size is . Inspection with an infrared camera revealed other characters, suggesting that the was used for writing practice. Another , excavated in 1997 from the Miyamachi archaeological site in Kōka, Shiga, contains poem 3807 in volume 16. It is dated to the middle of the 8th century, and is wide by thick. Lastly, a excavated at the Ishigami archaeological site in Asuka, Nara, contains the first 14 characters of poem 1391, in volume 7, written in . Its size is , and it is dated to the late 7th century, making it the oldest of the three.

Plant species cited

More than 150 species of grasses and trees are mentioned in approximately 1,500 entries of the . A is a botanical garden that attempts to contain every species and variety of plant mentioned in the anthology. There are dozens of these gardens around Japan. The first opened in Kasuga Shrine in 1932.

See also

* Kotodama
* Reiwa
* Umi Yukaba

Notes

References

Citations

Works cited

*
*
*

Further reading

;Texts and translations
* J.L.Pierson (1929): ''The Manyōśū. Translated and Annotated, Book 1''. Late E.J.Brill LTD, Leyden 1929
* The Japanese Classics Translation Committee (1940): ''The Manyōshū. One Thousand Poems Selected and Translated from the Japanese''. Iwanami, Tokyo 1940
* Kenneth Yasuda (1960): ''The Reed Plains. Ancient Japanese Lyrics from the Manyōśū with Interpretive Paintings by Sanko Inoue''. Charles E. Tuttle Company, Tokyo 1960
*
* Theodore De Bary: ''Manyōshū''. Columbia University Press, New York 1969
*
*
*
*
*, Kanda University of International Studies, Chiba City
*
*
;General
*
*
*
*

External links

*
Manyōshū
'' – from the University of Virginia Japanese Text Initiative website
* Manuscript scans at Waseda University Library
1709

1858

unknown

* '' Manyōshū'' – Columbia University Press, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation 1940, 1965

{{DEFAULTSORT:Manyoshu

Japanese poetry anthologies
Old Japanese texts
Nara-period works
Asuka period
Nara period
8th-century Japanese books