SOURCE: Konishi, Jin'ichi. “Waka Composition.” In A History of Japanese Literature, Volume One: The Archaic and Ancient Ages, translated by Aileen Gatten and Nicholas Teele, edited by Earl Miner, pp. 393-417. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Konishi discusses the prevailing style of lyric composition in the Man'yōshū, emphasizing individualistic expression and technical innovation.]

FROM KOTODAMA TO GA

[Kakinomoto] Hitomaro's chief intent was to use contact with the advances of Chinese civilization to give him personal insight into the indigenous Yamato [or, early central Japanese] culture. And when he turned to express himself in poetry, his guide phrases, which maintained kotodama [the belief that auspicious or inauspicious events occurred as a result of certain turns of phrase], played a crucial role. During the second stage of the Ancient Age, waka poets held to the same way of thought, although there are not a few differences in the poetic styles of the two stages. During the second, poets believed they could use Chinese writings, to some degree, to act as agents of Yamato expression. In putting that aim into practice they conclusively weakened kotodama.

The poets did not lose faith in kotodama. We recall that it was Okura who called Yamato “A land where the kotodama / Brings us good fortune.” He was not alone in thinking so. In the seventh intercalary month of 746, as Ōtomo Yakamochi was on his way to the governorship of Etchū, he received a poem from his aunt, Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoe … :

          Kusamakura
Tabi yuku kimi o
          Sakiku aredo
Iwaie suetsu
Aga toko no he ni.
Grass for your pillow,
Your journey takes you afar.
I pray you prosper
To the length of sacred cords
That adorn my bedside.

([Man'yōshū; hereafter MYS], 17:3927)

Although there is some doubt that things were to go as well as she hoped, the poem itself is definitely affirmative. If a messenger recited the poem in Yakamochi's presence, the orally delivered kotodama would reach him, amplifying his prospective good fortune. On New Year's Day 759, as he was ending his service as governor of Inaba, Yakamochi composed a poem at the banquet to which his staff treated him.

          Atarashiki
Toshi no hajime no
          Hatsu haru no
Kyō furu yuki no
Iyashiku yogoto.
Once more it is new,
The year that begins today
With the start of spring,
And may the snow that falls this day
Be good auspice to the land.

(MYS, 20:4516)

Here is the last datable poem in the collection, and presumably therefore Yakamochi's latest one included in it. Because it considers the snow a good omen, that falling on New Year's Day is invoked to increase the blessings on Yamato, an invocation of the kotodama by whose working this year, too, will be accompanied by good fortune. There is no question but that this is a pretty feeble poem by modern critical standards. But to Japanese, including myself, who possess traditional feelings, the auspicious life that is assumed will run throughout the new year causes profound sensations. That the same Yakamochi who could write other poems judged outstanding by modern standards should also have written this shows that the second stage of the Ancient Age was after all part of that Ancient Age—a time when the kotodama did retain validity. Nonetheless the difference between the two stages is that the kotodama which had flourished so in waka for the world inhabited by Hitomaro would shortly be gone. Why?

When Okura wrote of “A land where the kotodama / Brings us good fortune,” it was at the time the ninth T'ang embassy was embarking. In order that the kotodama invoked might promote the peace and prosperity hoped for, he also wrote of it as “From the Age of the Gods.” This stress shows the emphasis upon the Yamato character deliberately invoked for the kotodama. Similarly, the words of invocation had to be Yamatokotoba, Yamato words, because the kotodama would not function in a foreign language. There is something of a problem with the words Okura prefixed to his poem, “A Poem of ‘Good Departure, Good Return.’” In the Archaic Age and the earlier stage of the Ancient Age, poems had no topical title at all. Okura's should be contrasted with the forenote to the second poem in the Man'yōshū: “A Poem, composed when the Tennō ascended Kagu Hill to behold the country.” There are many poems with “titles” like this, “titles” supplied by a compiler to explain the circumstances of another person's composing a poem. This is not at all the same kind of “title” in which an individual author supplies information about the subject or character of the work. For example: “Prostrate with Grief before the Education Ministry” (Wen Hsüan, 30:674) or “There is Grief in a Spring Bedroom” (Gyokudai, 6:540). Of this variety of headnote the first seen in Japan is Okura's “Japanese Lament” (MYS, 5:794), no doubt reflecting Chinese usage. This returns us to the difficulty with headnotes that state a theme in the manner of Okura's “Poem of ‘Good Departure, Good Return.’”¹ For kotodama, Yamato words must be used. Of course Okura's poem is written in Yamato words. When he stated his topic in a Chinese headnote, Okura may well have been unaware of doing anything special, but the thought must have been hidden somewhere that it might be possible to work the Yamato kotodama in Chinese. In the T'ang Dynasty, “good departure” had something of the feeling of “goodbye,” a rather colloquial flavor, and even a nearly one-to-one equivalence with the Yamato “Fare well ahead / And come back soon” (MYS, 5:894).² Perhaps the kotodama would not fail even in the Chinese of “Good Departure, Good Return.” So much seems implied by Okura's later Chinese composition, “Sunk in Illness and Lamenting My Lot.”

“What people desire, Heaven bestows.” If there be truth in that saying, what I beg and entreat is quickly to be free from this illness, and I pray to be normal again.³

This Chinese prose does not simply set forth the state of the illness. Depending on the eloquence used in these words, Okura could hope to be relieved in his suffering. Because he was also a Buddhist he may also have held in the back of his mind the idea that reading sūtras would assist his recovery.⁴ We may also wonder if he, who could write about the kotodama in his poetry, did not think in more general terms that incantations delivered in spoken words would have results commensurate with the words, and if so, would that not be true in lands other than Yamato?

That would be to look at Yamato from the perspective of the world. Of course to the country at that early time the rest of “the world” constituted China, Korea, and India. The placing of Yamato in that larger “world” must have betokened a considerable alteration in the way the Yamato people regarded themselves. One of the signs is that Yamato was now internationally recognized as a state. This self-awareness of living at the eastern verge of the “world,” as if at the origin of life, led to a desire to change the name by which China and Korea had called the country, from the “Wa” [Ch. Wo] used earlier to a word connoting the land where the sun originates: Nihon.⁵ At the time of one of the T'ang embassies, the Chinese thought very arrogant the desire of representatives of Wa or Yamato to be referred to as people of Nihon. Many records from that time remark on the stated desire with irritation.⁶ If in the Chinese view the Japanese preference was arrogant, to those of Yamato it was in the nature of an announcement of arrival on the international stage.

This current had already begun to run in the seventh century, and by the beginning of the next its flow was visible in literature as well. There is an example in a poem by Priest Benshō, “In the T'ang, Longing for My Proper Home.” He had gone with the seventh embassy to study, and wrote:

In the region of the sun I look for Nihon;
At the bank of clouds I hope for a cloudbreak.

(Kaifū, 27)

This was probably the first literary usage of “Nihon” in history. Not long after this poem was written, Okura, who was on the same embassy, wrote a poem in Japanese for Tabito with the title, “Nihon (no) Banka” (“A Japanese Lament”). A “banka” was taken to be a poem written for a funeral, and there are examples of such usage in Selections of Refined Literature. Okura's use is not that of the Chinese, who recited the verses as the remains of the deceased were being taken to burial. Instead he laments an absent dead person. Perhaps he was aware of his departure from Chinese usage and that is why he insists on a Japanese lament. Recognizing the difference, he offered the novel “Nihon no Banka” to clarify the differences. To make possible this usage, this sense of national comparability, he must have held a prior premise, “Chinese shih and our waka are the same in being poetry.” Waka was not simply Yamato uta but in fact had ceased to be something essentially different from Chinese poetry.

Until this point in my History I have been using “Yamato” to designate Japan. This decision was reached after lengthy consideration of the nature of both the Archaic Age and the Ancient Age in its first stage. Henceforth the term to be used in the discussion reflects the change in attitude just described: the country is now to be considered Nihon.⁷

The boat of the seventh T'ang embassy carrying back Okura and the priest Benshō also bore the Wang Po Collection and “The Visit to the Immortals' Dwelling.” This embassy had great influence on the second stage of the Ancient Age, as is shown by that rising awareness at the time of an internationally conceived “Nihon,” Japan. The question this raises for waka is: what in fact were the changes, in practical terms? In what follows I wish to distinguish four.

One external innovation is the composing of waka with an accompanying preface in Chinese prose. It has been observed how the Japanese wrote Chinese prose prefaces for their Chinese poems, after the manner of early T'ang practice. Tabito and Okura's group were now going so far as to write Chinese prefaces for Japanese poems. The best example is no doubt one we have considered, Tabito's “Preface to an Excursion to the Matsura River.” There is no question but that the preface itself had to be sufficiently independent to be appreciated for its fine prose. But it also had to participate in a structural plan that would render integral, as one expressive world, the preface-and-poem. It is one thing to write a preface for a Japanese poem in the presumption that a single expressive integer will result. Without the assumption mentioned earlier—that the Chinese shih and Japanese waka are the same in essence—as an explicit basis for the practice, the integration would not be feasible, either for the literary expression or for its readers. In the plum-blossom viewing banquet held by Tabito at his private residence on the thirteenth of the First Month in 730, thirty-two poems were composed. It was an epoch-making event to join to them a preface in Chinese. Edo-period commentators on the Man'yōshū made the connection between that preface and Wang Hsi-chih's own to his “Record of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering” (Lan-t'ing Chi). We must go further: not simply the prose preface, but the plum-blossom viewing banquet itself was modeled on the assembly of poets at the Orchid Pavilion.⁸ Tabito's banquet seems to have excited contemporary fame in the capital, and there have come down to us the poems written as later response by Yoshida Yoroshi and Ōtomo Fumimochi (MYS, 5:864; 17:901-6). These are the reasons why this banquet of Tabito's was chosen as the symbolic dividing-point between the two stages of the Ancient Age.

A second change for waka involves the individualism that entered into poetry. The adding of a preface in Chinese was, for Yakamochi, a way of substituting a bit of correspondence for a proper preface. The sedōka he composed with Ikenushi (MYS, 17:3965) has that air. The contents of the correspondence run much like, “Because of illness, I have not been able to attend to my affairs,” or “Let me acknowledge receipt of your excellent poem.” That being the way of letters, Yakamochi may have thought waka should resemble them in tone. In the earlier stage of the Ancient Age poems had such personal elements, but the feeling that informed the poetry was that which anyone might have had in such a situation, and the poet acted as a representative for all. But to Yakamochi and other later ancient poets, the feeling expressed is commonly that of the response or circumstances personal to the writer at that time. The poems by Hitomaro offer us little insight into his biography, and it is seldom clear as to the circumstances in which he wrote, although modern Japanese find them impressive. Few modern readers find Yakamochi's poems consistently impressive in themselves. To appreciate them, it is necessary to savor them in the discoverable context of his life and the immediate background. Since in fact we can know so relatively little about the circumstances when he composed, it is easy to undervalue them.

Yakamochi was not the first to feature individual feeling. Tabito and Okura had their tries before him. But those poems usually express shared thoughts and feelings in a private situation. For example, there are Tabito's thirteen “Poems in Praise of Wine” (MYS, 3:338-50). These express ideals of reclusion that derive from Taoist thought, and it is Tabito whom we must credit for first using established Chinese thought as material for waka. In his “Poem to Set a Confused Heart Straight,” Okura draws freshly on Confucian logic and realism, even if nothing strikes the eye as philosophically new. It is difficult to know how seriously to take the more or less Taoist outlook of elite profession that Tabito flaunts, but Okura sets forth in his poem a fictional, Tabito-style Professor Disdain, adopting a position that seems to mount indirect opposition to Tabito's “Elite Profession” in his “Poems in Praise of Wine” (Takagi Ichinosuke, 1941, 414-16).⁹ This resistance derives from the distance in individual outlook between Tabito and Okura. That is not to say that either of them falsified their personal views. Take this poem by Tabito:

          Yo no naka wa
Munashiki mono to
          Shiru toki shi
Iyoyo masumasu
Kanashikarikeri.
Each time that I realize
The transience of
This world,
The more, the harder
I am struck with sadness.

(MYS, 5:793)

This of course proclaims the familiar moral that the world is a vain and insubstantial thing.¹⁰ And although expressed in religious terms—which should have alleviated his sense of bereavement—we find “The more, the harder / I am struck with sadness.” This is Tabito's special, private outlook.

There is also Okura's “Poem on Thinking of His Children” with its preface.

Śākyamūni expounds truthfully from his golden mouth, “I love all things equally, the way I love my child, Rāhula.” He also teaches us, “No love is greater than the love for one's child.” Even the greatest of saints cherishes his child. Who, then, among the living creatures of this world could fail to love children claimed as one's own?

          Uri hameba
Kodomo omōyu
          Kuri hameba
Mashite shinowayu
          Izuko yori
Kitarishi mono so
          Manakai ni
Motona kakarite
Yasui shi nasanu.
When I eat melon,
I long for my children;
When I eat chestnuts,
I yearn all the more.
Where could it be
That they come from to me?
They and their doings
Are visions before me,
And I cannot sleep at ease.

ENVOY

          Shirokane mo
Kogane mo tama mo
          Nani sen ni
Masareru takara
Ko ni ikame yamo.
What could I do
With either a heap of silver
Or with gold and pearls?
The greatest treasure world of all
Would not equal a child of mine.(11)

Okura expresses orthodox morality in his preface and a personal feeling all his own in phrases of his envoy—“When I eat melon” and “When I eat chestnuts.” Okura's poems include some with headnotes like “A Poem Boldly Expressing My Own Feelings,” well revealing the individualism that had grown so much by this time.

The third innovation is the development of fictionality. The technique of using a fictional speaker had already been used by the time of Hitomaro. But, as in the Archaic Age, it was still often unclear whether the speaker was fictional or represented the author. In contrast, during the latter stage of the Ancient Age, an unquestionably fictional character may appear before us, much like a member in a theatrical cast, as a distinct person. As evidence we can take the poems written on the twenty-eighth of the Third Month of 739. The occasion was Isonokami Otomaro's arrest and banishment to Tosa for getting into trouble with a woman.¹²

          Isonokami
Furu no mikoto wa
          Tawayame no
Matoi ni yorite
          Umajimono
Nawa toritsuke
          Shishijimono
Yumiya kakumite
          Ōkimi no
Mikoto kashikomi
          Amazakaru
Hinae ni makaru
          Furukoromo
Matsuchiyama yori
Kaerikonu kamo.
Isonokami,
You great man from Furu,
Because of your mistake,
Getting that woman in trouble,
You are like a horse
Drawn along by a rope,
You are like a boar,
Hemmed in by bows and arrows.
By the command
Of our dread Sovereign,
You must depart for a province
Distant as the heavens
Off there on the tatters
Of Matsuchi Mountain—
Will you come back from there?
Ōkimi no
Mikoto kashikomi
          Sashinarabu
Kuni ni idemasu
          Hashikiyashi
Waga se no kimi o
          Kakemaku mo
Yuyushi kashikoshi
          Suminoe no
Araitokami
          Funa no e ni
Ushihakitamai
          Tsukitamawan
Shima no sakizaki
          Yoritamawan
Iso no sakizaki
          Araki nami
Kaze ni awasezu
          Tsutsumi naku
Yamai arasezu
          Sumuyakeku
Kaeritamawane
Moto no kunihe ni.
By the command
Of our dread Sovereign
You are taken off,
Going away to some province.
Dear and beloved,
My lord husband,
May the fearsome gods
Dwelling at Suminoe
Take on human shape
And condescend to guard
At the prow of your boat,
Staying close beside you
Delivering you safe
From the juts and points of isles,
Preserving you safe
From the juts and points of shores,
Keeping your boat free
From the rough waves and the winds,
Kept in good health
And protected against disease,
And with no delay
Bring you back home again
To your native land.
          Chichigimi ni
Ware wa manago zo
          Hahatoji ni
Ware wa manago zo
          Mainoboru
Yasoujihito no
          Tamuke suru
Kashiko no saka ni
          Nusa matsuri
Ware wa zo oieru
Tōki Tosaji o.
My lord and father
Held me his beloved son,
My lady mother
Held me her beloved son.
Travelers from the eighty clans
Come back to the capital
Up the awesome Kashiko Slope,
Making offerings at the shrines
Tugging at the sacred rope,
While I press on and on
Over the road to distant Tosa.

ENVOY

          Ōsaki no
Kami no obama ni
          Sebakedo mo
Momofunabito mo
Sugu to iwanaku ni.
The Ōsaki strand
Where the god rules the shore
Is a constricted place—
Unlike the many boatmen going forth,
I must remain in exile here.

The first poem is related from the external viewpoint of a narrator, the second from the point of view of Otomaro's wife, and the third that of their child.¹³ The envoy is presented as if Otomaro himself is speaker. This dramatic mode had been experimented with about seven years earlier by Okura in his “A Dialogue on Poverty” (MYS, 5:892-93). The development of the technique of distinct fictional speakers had as one of its causes the emergence in China of fu that introduced fictional speakers. There are, for example, the “The Rhapsody of Master Imaginary” and “The Rhapsody on the Imperial Park,” by Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju. In 728 the court school introduced a new literary curriculum with Selections of Refined Literature as principal textbook. With such a resource, nearly every Chinese technique could become known quickly.

If Hitomaro's use of fictional speakers constituted a development of elements from songs of the Archaic Age, during the period of Tempyō culture the models for fictional speakers were found in Chinese literature.¹⁴ If there was a problem in this, it was not the civilized attainments of individual poets but the general level of the literary audience. Tabito's “Poem on a Japanese Paulownia Zither” (MYS, 5:810-11) involves a dialogue, in a dream, between the spirit of the zither and the poet, so that in this instance it is not simply the speaker who is fictional. The poem was composed for presentation to Fujiwara Fusasaki, a person of such learning that it was unnecessary for him to attend the national school, and of sufficient talent for three of his Chinese poems to survive in the Kaifūsō (85-87). Tabito also makes use of a fictional speaker in his “Preface to an Excursion to the Matsura River” (MYS, 5:853-63). This was presented to Yoshida Yoroshi, again a person whose sophistication is not in question, since he also has poems in the Kaifūsō (79-80). The Otomaro poems differ in seeming to be intended for a readership possessing no special acquaintance with Chinese poetry. To the extent that the Otomaro poems caused no contemporary perplexity, we can see that people brought up on the new learning in such books as the Selections had grown in number, producing many more sophisticated readers of Japanese poetry.

The fourth change involves the alteration in guide phrases. The expressive aim of late Six Dynasties poetry centered on how beautifully something might be said, and that “how” was dependent on the originality and freshness of the individual author. When that expressive aim became widespread in Japan, authors chose to rely less on the kotodama, which epitomized the ancient linguistic usage of Yamato, and to turn instead to a subjectivity by which the author as an individual wrote with that individual's own words. The result was the deterioration in guide phrases. For those consisting of a five-syllable line, there was a weakening of the kotodama—although of course they gave ornamental emphasis to the words that followed. They became the so-called pillow-words (makurakotoba). For those guide phrases consisting of a number of lines—now the so-called prefaces (joshi)—the function changed from the older one of leading into the lines expressing the main predication. They became instead meaningful prefaces (ushin joshi, ushin no jo). For both, the decrease was in quantity as well as quality. The conclusion of this trend occurs only in the Middle Ages, but as early as this later stage of the Ancient Age, the direction of change is clear. To distinguish the expressions in which the working of kotodama has weakened from its strength in those guide words and phrases of earlier times, I should like to identify the new usage of guide words and phrases by their familiar terms: pillow-words and prefatory words (jokotoba). A variety of confusions has arisen from conceptual imprecision in distinguishing between usage in medieval waka as opposed to that in the earlier Ancient Age and before.

In many respects it is easy to apprehend the damages implied by the shift to makurakotoba. The poems chosen to symbolize the dividing line between the former and latter stages of the Ancient Age, the “Poems from the Plum Blossom Banquet” by Tabito and others, include some forty-five—of which only one uses a pillow-word. That poem is by Tabito (MYS, 5:822):

          Waga sono ni
Ume no hana chiru
          Hisakata no
Ame yori yuki no
Nagarekuru kamo.
In my garden
Fall the blossoms of the plum;
From distant reaches,
From the heavens the snow
Seems to come in a stream.

“Hisakata no” is a very old, now conventionalized expression prefixed to celestial phenomena. It could be omitted from the poem with no alteration in meaning. Because omitting the guide phrase “Tamamo karu” (Where they gather fine seagrass) from Hitomaro's poem (MYS, 3:250) would alter the meaning of the poem, its function is altogether different.

Or again, in the eighty-two lines making up Okura's chōka and hanka in “A Dialogue on Poverty” (MYS, 5:892-93), there is but one pillow-word-like expression, “Nuedori no” (The tiger thrush)—and if we follow Takagi's analysis, even that is not a pillow-word (Takagi Ichinosuke, 1941:104-5). This evidence suggests that in a situation dominated by Sinified expressive aims it became difficult to use pillow-words. The decrease in the frequency of use of pillow-words is an unmistakable feature of the second stage of the Ancient Age. Moreover, at this time, when surviving poems are relatively numerous, there is also a decline for the first time in the number of individual pillow-words used. Whereas Hitomaro used 106 individual “pillow-words” a total of 178 times, Yakamochi uses but 90 individual pillow-words a total of 237 times.¹⁵ This must surely be taken as a development characteristic of literature at the time. As part of that development, pillow-words are becoming decorative language.

With prefatory words and phrases, the development was toward the so-called meaningful prefaces. With the weakening of that imparted vitality which had been the original purpose of these phrases, it became uneconomical to waste several lines on that which now seemed unrelated to the main body of the poem. This practicality became the main concern, so that along with the extinction of Hitomaro-style lengthy guide phrases, there is in tanka only the meaningful preface, whose scene and situation are described in ways painstakingly related to what follows. The practical spirit first appears in circumstances involving Sinified expressive aims. As we have seen, there is the atmosphere of hovering over the poems related to Tabito's “Preface to an Excursion to the Matsura River.” In the eleven poems of this group, there is not one use of a pillow-word. The sole use of a preface follows.

          /Wakayu tsuru
Matsura no kawa no
          Kawanami no/
Nami ni shi mowaba
Ware koime yamo.
/Like the Matsura
Where we angle fish
In the river waves/
If I loved you as is usual,
Would I yearn for you like this!

(MYS, 5:858)

The preface in the first three lines has as its juncture with the last two a play on “kawanami” and “nami ni” [in the translation “river waves,” “as is usual”]. But along with this traditional device we have verisimilar description of activities at a riverside.

When juncture is effected by homophony, something of the old-style usage remains. We find completed specimens of the meaningful preface when the connection is effected metaphorically. A poem by Yakamochi (MYS, 4:785) will serve as example:

          /Waga yado no
Kusa no ue shiroku
          Oku tsuyu no/
Inochi mo oshikarazu
Imo ni awazareba.
/The dew settles
White upon the plants
About my house/
Insubstantial life means nothing
When I cannot have her I love.

This use of the familiar emblem of dew for life's evanescence lacks that infusion of vitality which is the essence of how the kotodama works.

Of course none of this implies that poets had grown wholly dissatisfied with old styles of thought or with their expression in verse. Here is a poem by Fujiwara Kusumaro in reply to poems sent him by Yakamochi (MYS, 4:791).

          /Okuyama no
Iwakage ni ouru
          Suga no ne ni/
Nemokoro ware mo
Ai omowazare ya.
/In distant mountains
Under shade of boulders grows
The fine-rooted sedge/
With what great depths do I
Not also yearn to be with you.

But the poetic trend was in general toward the meaningful preface. That trend would be a legacy to the Kokinshū. And the poets who gave the trend its force—Okura, Tabito, Yakamochi, among others—had been imbued with the Sinified aim of individualistic expression.

POETRY OF THOSE AT THE CAPITAL

More poems in the Man'yōshū come from the period of Yakamochi than from any other. The style of this large body of poems does not differ much from the style of poetry at the time of Tabito and Okura, so that if a distinction is to be made, this corpus of poems has an air of refinement and may be called “poetry of those at the capital.”

In the poems by Yakamochi and other later writers, we often find contrasts between the capital and rusticity, or expressions of longing for the capital at Nara from courtiers posted to the provinces. Both Tabito and Okura have a poem of such a general kind (3:331; 5:880). But their numbers are so small that generalization is not feasible. There is also the expression “the countryside, distant as the sky” (amazakaru hina), which appears twenty-three times in the Man'yōshū, with eighteen from poems in Yakamochi's time. The capital was much preferred.

          Aoniyoshi
Nara no miyako wa
          Saku hana no
Niou ga gotoku
Ima sakari nari.
Lovely in colored earth
Nara the royal capital
Abloom with flowers—
As if they set it all aglow—
Now at their height of bloom.

(MYS, 3:328)

The Nara of the time referred to by this poem was a city modeled, in its checkerboard of streets, on Ch'ang-an, and along those regularly crossing streets were planted willows (MYS, 19:4142). To the east and to the west were markets, and people of the time felt an urban bustle (MYS, 3:310; 7:1264). The nobility went to and fro on proud horses. When they described those scenes, the Japanese had in mind poetic descriptions of the prosperity of Ch'ang-an. Here is some Chinese nostalgia, “On the Ch'ang-an of Old,” by Lu Chao-lin (635-84).

The southern streets and northern palaces join in the northern quarter,
The five-branched roads and the three avenues set bounds to the three markets.
Tender willows and green pagoda trees sweep the ground where they droop.
Fresh breezes raise red dust, darkening the expanse of sky.

(Ch'üan T'ang Shih, 41:5-9)

After they had become accustomed to broad avenues like those of the capital, the difficulty of walking in the country must have come as a shock.

          Aoniyoshi
Nara no ōchi wa
          Yuki yokedo
Kono yamamichi wa
Yuki ashikarikeri.
Lovely in colored earth
Nara has wide avenues
Where it is good to go,
But this mountain path out here
Makes the going very bad.

MYS, 15:3728)

After living for a time in the country, one's spirits flag.

          Shiratama no
Migahoshi kimi o
          Mizu hisa ni
Hina ni shi oreba
Ikeru to mo nashi.
As dear as pearls,
You whom I wish to see and yet
Do not this long while—
Oh, this being in the country,
You cannot call it life at all.

(MYS, 19:4170)

For these poets, real life existed only in the capital. From this attitude, as a remote source, was born the conception of “travel” (tabi) codified in the renga of the High Middle Ages—a travel stanza was one dealing with passage from the capital to the country or from province to province: to go from the country to the capital was to return, not to travel at all. In the earlier stage of the Ancient Age there was no such literary awareness of life in the capital. The concept of “poetry of those at the capital” is one that first appears during Yakamochi's time. And what were the special characteristics of those at the capital? What implications did the capital have for their writing?

Among the special characteristics of those people at that time, the very first requiring mention is that they were educated in the culture of a foreign country. It was essential that they have the most up-to-date information about T'ang China. They made some misjudgments, as in bringing home from China “The Visit to the Immortals' Dwelling” as a presumed classic, whereas to the Chinese it was a trivial bit of zoku writing; or in taking as their poetic model the declining phase of Six Dynasties poetry. Such distortions were inevitable, however, and their awareness certainly led them to aim at what was newest in the culture of the T'ang Dynasty. Yakamochi and perhaps others were brought up in Tabito's residence, living with a nun from Silla (MYS, 3:460-61). He cold only have had the warmest affection for that foreign culture from his childhood.

These people of the capital, with their information about the continent, assumed they had a mutual possession. The premise for poetic composition in Yakamochi's time was that “the people I know possess the same knowledge I have of Chinese literature.” Perhaps before he turned twenty, Yakamochi sent a number of love poems (sōmonka) to the girl later his wife, Ōiratsume (the Eldest Daughter) of the Sakanoe house. Here are the first two of one run of fifteen (MYS, 4:471-472).

          Ime no ai wa
Kurushikarikeri
          Odorokite
Kakisaguredo mo
Te ni mo oreneba.
Loving in a dream,
What suffering has it brought—
For I awake,
And though I reach about for you,
I cannot feel you with my hands.
          Hitoe nomi
Imo ga musaban
          Obi o sura
Mie musabu beku
Waga mi ga narinu.
The sash, remember it?
The one, my dear, that you tied
Just once about me—
So much my yearning wastes me
It goes around me three times now.

These are poems in the wake of works like “The Visit to the Immortals' Dwelling,” writings redolent of predecessors.¹⁶

As Yakamochi wrote, Ōiratsume was ten years old, obviously with no conception of Chinese literature. On the other hand, her mother—Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoe—welcomed with enthusiasm the prospect of her daughter's becoming Yakamochi's wife, and it appears that she stood in for her daughter, responding poetically to Yakamochi (Yamamoto, 1971, 152). Yakamochi no doubt also believed that the mother would acquaint her daughter with “The Visit to the Immortals' Dwelling.” Mother and suitor composed poems on the same topic, “The Crescent Moon.” His precedes hers (MYS, 6:993, 994).

          Tsuki tachite
Tada mikazuki no
          Mayone kaki
Ke nagaku koishi
Kimi ni aeru kamo.
The moon comes up,
And just like the crescent moon,
My eyebrows as they itch—
And having yearned for you so long
I find that at last I have you.
          Furisakete
Mikazuki mireba
          Hitome mishi
Hito no mayobiki
Omowayuru kamo.
Casting my gaze about
I see the crescent moon,
And just one look
Upon those blackened eyebrows
Is enough to make me yearn.

The reference to blackened eyebrows derives from knowledge about Chinese cosmetics, about customs that probably originated in Iran or India. Similar kinds of exotic depiction can be found in holdings in the Shōsōin—a picture of a beautiful woman standing beneath a tree, or a folding screen depicting a woman whose head is decorated with feathers.¹⁷ Chinese poets refer solely to women's eyebrows as moths' eyebrows—that is, broadly painted ones—and sometimes the moon is compared to them, as in a couplet from Ho Tzu-lang's “In Reply to Mr. Miao's Poem, ‘On the Moon’”:

Brilliant and lucid sparkle the pool's waters,
The reflection seen is the moth-browed moon.

(Gyokudai, 5:529)

There are no examples of moons compared to thinly drawn eyebrows. And if Lady Ōtomo and Yakamochi wrote from shared knowledge, that does not mean they were simply drawing on the exotic appeals of another country, but that their writing had the specific aim of giving expression to “the new” (atarashimi).

Seventeen years later, Yakamochi wrote two poems under the heading “Gazing Intently at the Peaches and Plums in My Spring Garden” (MYS, 19:4139, 4140).

          Haru no sono
Kurenai niou
          Momo no hana
Shitaderu michi ni
Idetatsu otome.
The garden in spring
Glows with the crimson
Of the peach flowers,
And on the brightened path beneath
A young woman stops to gaze.
          Waga sono no
Sumomo no hana ka
          Niwa ni chiru
Hadare no imada
Nokoritaru kamo.
In my garden
They are plum flowers, are they?
There they fall,
Or is it a patch of snowflakes
That somehow still remains?

It is well known that the former poem uses the same motif as the picture in the Shōsōin, a beautiful woman standing beneath a tree.¹⁸ Taken together the two poems function like parallel lines in Chinese verse, although no doubt their chief aim is to appreciate the rich coloring projected. A poem by Hsiao Kang, “In Reply to the Prince of Hsiangtung's Poem, ‘A Famous Scholar Likes Beauties,’” contains these lines:

The window where she makes up is screened by the willow's color,
On the well water shines the peach blossom's crimson.

(Gyokudai, 7:559)

Yakamochi's poems seem to make use of these lines. Yet it must be said that in late Six Dynasties or early T'ang poetry, when the subject is a beautiful woman in a lovely scene, she is shown applying makeup, walking, dancing, or somehow moving, whereas Yakamochi's pictorialism records a woman in an arrested pose. It may well be that, to a readership well versed in Chinese poetry, that halted pose held appeal for its novelty (atarashimi).

The expressive attitude, the implicit tone of the poetry of Tempyō era culture, is a second important characteristic. From the beginning of this History, implicitness has been postulated as one of the characteristics of all Japanese literature. It is a quality that becomes fully marked with the poets of the capital. We can begin with the admission of conceptual similarities as a first manifestation of that implicitness. Here is a poem from Yakamochi's earliest period, when he was perhaps twelve (MYS, 8:1441).

          Uchikirashi
Yuki wa furitsutsu
          Shikasuga ni
Wagie no sono ni
Uguisu naku mo.
White haze comes to the sky
And the snow falls on and on—
Be that as it may,
In the garden of my house
The warbler already sings.

In a poem written some two years before and included among the “Poems of the Plum Blossom Banquet” arranged by Tabito, Ōtomo Momoyo had written similarly (MYS, 5:823):

          Ume no hana
Chiraku wa izuku
          Shikasuga ni
Kono Ki no yama ni
Yuki wa furitsutsu.
Blossoms of the plum,
Where is it that they fall?
Be that as it may,
Here at Ki among the hills
The snow falls on and on.

Of course Yakamochi must have known Momoyo's poem, and one can easily multiply examples of this kind.¹⁹

          Uchinabiku
Haru sarikureba
          Shikasuga ni
Ama kumo kirai
Yuki wa furitsutsu.
At last signs beckon:
Spring has definitely come;
Be that as it may,
From the clouds that mist the sky
The snow falls on and on.
          Ume no hana
Sakichirisuginu
          Shikasuga ni
Shirayuki niwa ni
Furishikiritsutsu.
Blossoms of the plum
Have opened and already fallen;
Be that as it may,
The white snow in my garden
Falls on and on and on.
          Yama no ki ni
Yuki wa furitsutsu
          Shikasuga ni
Kono kawayagi wa
Moetekeru kamo.
At the mountain's edge,
The snow falls on and on;
Be that as it may,
The willows by this riverbank
Have begun to shine with green.

(MYS, 10:1832, 1834, 1848)

A variety of criticism of such practice has been entered by practitioners of modern tanka. But if we treat the poems as examples of literary practice in this later stage of the Ancient Age, what we see is no less than the emergence of the poetry of those at the capital. We see poets whose thoughts and feelings have been refined by contact with an advanced culture. Their temper reflected some desire to escape from the increasing complexity of the social environment of the capital, and probably they became increasingly sensitive as well. So sensitive a temper recoils in particular from the stimulus of the excessive.

It was not like these people of the capital to hold that intense speaking was requisite to move the feelings. On the contrary, to a ripe sensibility the smallest stimulus could provide one with a suitable degree of agitation. There was, as a consequence, no need to search for novelties of material or design. Poets sanctioned the joining of largely similar phrases. With the large-scale, sophisticated entropy of the time, the people of the capital must have taken pride in the minute differences they so efficiently perceived and communicated. That is why poets relied on a readership likewise sensitive and able to pursue minute variations among a number of models.²⁰ This is at one with the expressive awareness found in the Kokinshū: the later stage of the Ancient Age includes the vanguard of the Middle Ages.

The implications typical of those at the capital often found expression in sadness (shūshi). From the observation that human existence could not escape eventual extinction in the infinite flow of time and the vast reaches of the cosmos, there was born a sense of transience (hakanasa). With that came a change in the workings of contemplative reasoning. As early as the Archaic Age, there had been poems speaking of the sorrow (kanashimi) leading to shedding tears of blood over the death of one's spouse. In the new age, however, despair or bereavement directly conveyed were not the affective materials of poetry. Rather, in both rational and emotional response to the quality of human life in its entirety, the implicit sense of transience led to expressions of sadness.

Here are three poems by Yakamochi on the twenty-third and twenty-fifth of the Second Month of 753 (MYS, 19:4290-92).

          Haru no no ni
Kasumi tanabiki
          Urakanashi
Kono yūkage ni
Uguisu naku mo.
Over the spring fields
The haze trails in banners,
And it is all so sad,
While from this evening's shadows
The warbler also sings its song.
          Waga yado no
Isasa muratake
          Fuku kaze ni
Oto no kasokeki
Kono yūbe kamo.
Here at my house
Stands a meager bamboo grove;
In the wind that blows
The sound itself turns dark
As this evening falls.
          Uraura ni
Tereru haruhi ni
          Hibari agari
Kokoro kanashi mo
Hitori shi omoeba.
Softly, softly,
The spring sunlight shines,
A lark rising in it;
And there is sadness in my heart
That I should feel these things alone.

These three are among Yakamochi's very finest poems. The sensitive description offers a feeling of deep loneliness aroused by faint sounds greeting the ear. That feeling is heightened the more for being aroused amid the overflowing brightness of spring. Many critics have pointed out acute sensations of a modern kind in these poems and have so praised them. Certainly it is possible to appreciate these poems on the basis of their having a modern sense of isolation: undeniably that is one way of access to them. On the other hand, it is obvious that Yakamochi is not a modern poet, and if we account for the ancient character of the isolation expressed in the three poems, we shall get closer to their original conception.

About the middle of the Six Dynasties in China there emerged an aesthetic understanding that human life takes place within a vast natural scene. One feature of this was the view of human life as something floating on an eternal temporal stream. Perhaps the first poem of this kind was the “Fu Lamenting Time's Passage” by Lu Chi (261-303). Another feature was the transience of life derived from consideration of human drifting through the boundless reaches of the cosmos. This was first observed in “A Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering” by Wang Hsi-chih (Shiba, 1958, 114). However, this kind of thought was presented as explicit thought, and writing that depicts human transience melting away in natural description was not seen until later, in T'ao Ch'ien. The poem he wrote—“A Poem Given to My Cousin, Ching-yüan, Composed in the Twelfth Month [of 403]” (Tōshi, 3:423-24)—consists of twenty lines, of which the fifth through eighth are:

Frigid, frigid, the year ends in wind;
Dark, dark, the whole day wears out in snow.
Though I incline my ear, there is not even a faint voice:
What reaches my eye is stark white and certainly pure.

This is not vernal sadness but wintry severity.

If this writing about the silent, endless fall of snow that heightens human isolation is transposed to the scenery of spring, it would be at one with Yakamochi's “That I should feel these things alone.” It is not that Yakamochi was using this poem by T'ao Ch'ien. Because there is no lack of other Chinese poems on the subject, it is meaningless to point to a given poem as source. But if Yakamochi knew of the poetic motif of sadness treating the isolation and desolation which Chinese discovered in the human position between heaven and earth, then his molding his own impressions into the motif must show how aware he was that he was writing the poetry of the people at the capital. Surely his three poems show that just as in another poem he could exchange, for his own wife's stepping into their garden, the view of a Chinese woman amid the splendor of peach blossoms, so also he could write about his sensations of a spring day as if he had become a Chinese poet possessed by sadness. It is much too modern a notion that all he wrote about was his own immediate feelings. We shall not find poems like these three in the rest of Yakamochi's oeuvre, nor in writing after him. Their achievement occurred incidentally, touched off by Chinese poems of sadness. It does seem better to interpret them so rather than believe that Yakamochi had labored and labored, at last managing to drag his feet across some final poetic boundary.

There was a third feature. In addition to being, at any cost, people of the capital, these poets were never to forget an attitude of “play” (asobi) in every last aspect of their life, including poetry. There was in this an inclination to scorn as rustic those who knew no better than to be dead serious, taking everything with an open mouth. This was not to reject earnestness itself, however. One would wear a sober face when earnestness was required, just as one knew the right occasion to depart from the serious by exercising “latitude” (yutori): knowledge of decorum was essential to people of the capital. …

Notes

1. [The author's argument, which had turned on who wrote the headnote, now turns on the language in which it is written: Okura uses Chinese. Neither a third-party editor nor Chinese had traditional connection with the working of the kotodama.—Ed.]

2. This colloquial element was pointed out by Kojima Noriyuki (1952, 82-83). Since we observe the same colloquial “hao-ch'ü” in “Seeing a Boy off from the Mountain,” it is impossible to exclude the expression altogether from poetic diction. But since that poem is by a Silla priest, we also cannot say the expression is poetic and leave it at that.

3. [This prose piece follows MYS, 5:894, just discussed.—Ed.]

4. An early example is that of services for the cure of Temmu Tennō from a serious illness. According to the Temmuki (dating the event at 686; p. 385), there was a general court recitation of the Konkōmyōkyō (Suvarnaprabhāsottma Sūtra). It was believed that the strength of the rite lay in vocal recitation.

5. [The two characters for “Nihon” mean “sun's origin.” In modern times they have been pronounced “Nihon” or “Nippon.” At the time of the Taika Reform in 645, those characters were used but read “Yamato,” and in some poetic usages, as in renga, are pronounced “Hi no moto,” which is a non-Sinified reading. The author uses only the characters, without indication as to their pronunciation, and therefore “Japan” will be the translation hereafter. The presumption that he means “Nihon” derives from the fact that modern Japanese dictionaries use that pronunciation for their main entry—“Nippon” having somewhat nationalistic overtones. There are numerous other words used poetically or periphrastically for Japan: “Akitsushima,” “Shikishima,” and, indeed, “Yamato.” For “Yamato” the author uses katakana throughout rather than the usual two Chinese characters, the second of which is often read “wa” and used to designate “Japan” in character compounds. That “wa” is not to be confused with the other “wa” which is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese “Wo” used to designate Japan by the Chinese and Koreans: see the next note.—Ed.]

6. For example, in a kind of account or preface to the papers presented by the seventh T'ang embassy, a Chinese recorded in 703: “The country of Jih-pen [characters for ‘Nihon’] is another name for ‘The country of Wo’ [J. Wa]. Because that country is near where the sun rises, they give it the name of Jih-pen [‘country where the sun originates’]. Others say that those people do not like the name of ‘Wo’ [which literally means ‘dwarf’] and so changed to the new name. Others say that Jih-pen was originally a small country but that it has now swallowed up Wo. We do find that when they come on embassy, they are excessive in their talk about their country, which is why we Chinese cannot trust them” (Kyū Tōjo, 93). Actually it was the sixth rather than seventh embassy that had seemed conceited to the Chinese.

7. [The nearest we can approximate the shift is to change from “Yamato” (except when the author uses the term to designate the earlier state) to “Japan.”—Ed.]

8. On the third of the Third Month 353, Wang Hsi-chih held, along with purification rites, a garden party for composing poems, with forty-one famous guests in attendance (Shih-wen Lei-chü, pt. 1, vol. 87). There are also some prefaces for poems celebrating similar parties held by Yen Yen-chih and Wang Jung in the Wen Hsüan (46:1008-19).

9. The “Tzu-hsü Fu” and the “Shang-lin Fu” introduced fictional speakers and a dramatic mode into Chinese writing. [We have taken the translation of the title of Okura's work from Levy. The author in his Japanese plays off Okura's “Baizoku Sensei” (we take Levy's “Professor Disdain” as the translation) with his own Taoist-like coinage, “hanzoku.” So in the spirit of the author's wordplay, we contrast to Okura's “Professor Disdain” (Baizoku Sensei) Tabito's outlook of “Elite Profession” (Hanzoku).—Ed.]

10. One may recall: “Although when I was young I thought this world beautiful, the world is really false, errant, and an illusion,” Ch'ih-shih Ching, pt. 2; or, from the T'ien-shou-kuo Hsiu-chang Ming, there is also “The world is false and transient; the Buddha's retort is the truth.” But Okura's is so pervasive a Buddhist assumption that it seems unlikely to derive from any particular scriptural passage.

11. MYS, 5:802-3. [The translation of the preface is by Levy.—Ed.]

12. Ibid., 6:1019-22. The cause of Otomaro's exile was adultery with the [a?] wife of Fujiwara Umakai (Shokuki, vol. 13). While in Tosa, Otomaro composed four poems in Chinese that were selected for the Kaifūsō.

13. There is a possible problem with the text of the tenth line of the third poem. Kamo no Mabuchi glossed the line in a way making Otomaro speaker. The age requisite for adultery and other considerations makes that interpretation odd.

14. [“Tempyō Culture” is a phrase often used for the flowering of court culture from ca. 729-757, when the era names for part of Shōmu's reign and all of Kōken's had “Tempyō” designations: “Tempyō-Kampō,” etc.—Ed.]

15. [The author's contrast can be fully appreciated only by virtue of its involving by nineteen chōka by Hitomaro vs. forty-six by Yakamochi.—Ed.]

16. MYS, 4:741-42. With 741, cf. “For a moment I slept as I sat, then I had a dream of the Ten Beauties and the surprise awoke me in distraction, suddenly empty-handed. My heart was filled with a wan pleasure. I returned—what could I say?” (“Yūsenkutsu,” p. 119). And with 742, cf. “These eyes were wholly certain, both wild ducks were lost together. Day after day my robes seemed larger, morning after morning my sash loosened” (ibid., p. 188). These passages have been mentioned as sources since Keichū [d. 1701, one of the great Japanese scholars]. But the conception of the latter can be found in several poems, in both the Wen Hsüan and the Yü-t'ai Hsin-yung, so the connection cannot be called certain (Kojima, 1974, 1021).

17. In early [eighth-century] T'ang China, there were more than ten styles of makeup for women's eyebrows. But in general they can be distinguished as either thick and dark or fine and light. The style for the painting of the beautiful women under a tree and the woman on the screen is the thick and dark (“moth eyebrows”); Fujii Kiyoshi, 1966, 146-48. However, in the painting of the beautiful woman in foreign dress from Turfan [northern Sinkiang province in China] and the women pictured on the walls of the Takamatsuzuka tumulus [the Nara-Asuka area] the painted eyebrows are of the fine and light kind.

18. The Shōsōin picture referred to is believed to date from 752, and Yakamochi's poem from two years before that. Pictures of beautiful women under trees have been discovered in Astana in central Asia and in eastern Turkestan, and there must have been numerous T'ang examples (Fujii Kiyoshi, 1966, 136-38). It seems very possible that Yakamochi had seen the motif in materials imported from China.

19. See Yamamoto, 1971, 34-36. [The “kind” of motif referred to is one not simply involving shared diction and imagistic features of these two and the next three poems, but an implicit resemblance, as when—with elegant confusion—plum blossoms and snow petals are taken for each other. It will be clear that the poem by Yakamochi takes its second and third lines from Momoyo's fifth and third, sharing a common language but not making an allusion.—Ed.].

20. There was deliberate pursuit of associated images [such as the warbler and snow in Yakamochi's poem—Ed.]. For instance, the associated imagery for the hototogisu (a “summer” bird) includes: the mandarin orange (tachibana), appearing most often (sixteen times); thereafter deutzia (unohana, nine times), iris (ayame, eight times), and wisteria (fuji, six times). Infrequent associations are with the Japanese bead tree (ōchi, twice) and bush clover (hagi, once).