THE MAN'YōSHū

The Man'yōshū is the first, and in the opinion of most scholars of Japanese literature, the greatest collection of Japanese poetry. The exact period of the compilation is unknown, but the last dated poem was composed in 759, and the final selection of poems probably took place soon afterwards. The name of the compiler is not given, but there is strong reason to believe that Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718?-85), an important poet and sometime governor, edited the bulk of the Man'yōshū and possibly the entire work. The last four of the twenty books of the collection are given over so largely to his poetry that they have even been called his “poem diary.”

The three characters used to write the name of the collection, man, yō, and shū, mean literally “Ten Thousand Leaves Collection,” and it has been generally supposed that this was a figurative way of referring to the large number of poems contained in the collection, 4,516 in all; “ten thousand” (man), like the English word “myriad,” was often used to express any large number. According to the theory first advanced by scholars of Chinese literature, however, “ten thousand leaves” was a poetic way of saying “ten thousand ages,” and was so used in numerous Chinese texts. Even if we accept this emendation, it does not entirely clear up the ambiguity: should “ten thousand ages” be interpreted as an exaggerated description of the perhaps 400 years of poetry included in the Man'yōshū, or should it be interpreted as signifying that the collection was destined to last for ten thousand years? The meaning of the title remains to be determined.

The vast majority of the poems in the Man'yōshū are in the form of the tanka—a poem in five lines consisting respectively of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables. (The lack of a stress accent in Japanese and the excessive ease of rhyming caused poets to depend on syllabics as a means of distinguishing poetry from prose.) The masterpieces of the collection, however, are the chōka (long poems), of which there are 265 examples. A chōka was written in alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables with an additional line of 7 syllables at the end. The longest examples run to over 150 lines. There are also sixty-two poems in non-traditional forms, including four in Chinese. The oldest poem of the collection, if we can accept the traditional attribution, is the first, said to have been composed by the Emperor Yūryaku (reigned 457-79). Many poems bear prefaces composed in classical Chinese giving the circumstances of composition, which are usually not otherwise apparent because of the brevity of the tanka.

The poems were recorded in an extraordinarily complicated script. Chinese characters were used sometimes for their meaning, sometimes merely to transcribe Japanese sounds. The problems encountered when reading texts that combine two entirely different systems of writing, neither suited to the Japanese language, are enormous, and some poems have not yet been given definitive pronunciations. When a new system of writing, the kana, was invented in the ninth century it was so much more suited to writing Japanese than the earlier systems that people forgot how to read the Man'yōshū, and the collection as a whole was not rediscovered until the seventeenth century, though poems known as songs had survived.

The absorption of Chinese learning, originally undertaken mainly in the hopes of strengthening the country politically in face of the vastly more evolved continental culture, greatly enriched Japanese poetry, as we can tell by comparing the poems in the Man'yōshū with those in the even earlier Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), an account of Japan from the creation until the sixth century, which is virtually free of Chinese influence. New themes and new modes of expression were quickly adopted by the Japanese poets almost as soon as they came into contact with books of poetry from the continent. This influence is most readily apparent in the poems composed in Chinese by members of the court. In contrast, the Man'yōshū on first reading may seem almost untouched by this influence, but it is nonetheless present, and helps to account for the superiority of Man'yōshū poems to those in the Kojiki.

Although the Japanese were eager to improve their poetry by incorporating Chinese poetic techniques, they remained reluctant to use borrowed Chinese words in their poetry. This reluctance was maintained by tanka poets until the late nineteenth century. It is as if English poets after the Norman conquest had absorbed the techniques and subject matter of French poetry but had refused until the twentieth century to use any words not of pure Anglo-Saxon origin. Of the 6,343 different words in the Man'yōshū, all those of Chinese origin (with two exceptions only) are found in the heavily Buddhist Book XVI. Such words as hōshi (priest) and dan'ochi (parishioner) were probably used because no “pure” Japanese equivalents existed. A few words such as ume (plum; Chinese mei) and yanagi (willow; Chinese yang) were earlier borrowings that by this time had been assimilated into the Japanese language.

The Man'yōshū is unique among anthologies of Japanese poetry in the variety of its poetic forms, its subject matter, and its authors. Although the great majority of the poems are the short tanka, there are also dialogues and various other unusual poetic forms. However, the chōka are the glory of the collection. The chōka survived vestigially in some later collections, but the masters of this form were all Man'yōshū poets.

The content of the poetry is also exceptional. In most later anthologies the tanka are generally about the seasons or about love, but in the Man'yōshū many tanka describe travel, and there are also tanka of both humorous and deeply religious meaning. The chōka include elegies for deceased princes and princesses, poems commemorating events of national significance, and expressions of grief over the departure of soldiers for the frontier. Some poems reveal specific Chinese or Buddhist influence, such as those that praise liquor in the manner of the Taoists or those that insist in Buddhist fashion on the transitoriness of life.

The authorship of the poems is also exceptional in that poems by persons of humble status, in no way associated with the court, were included. It may be that some poems attributed to soldiers on the frontier or to rustics were in fact composed by courtiers assuming these roles, but many were surely by plebeian authors. In the Kokinshū and later imperial collections such poems were usually said to be “anonymous.”

Perhaps the quality of the Man'yōshū that most clearly distinguishes it from later Japanese poetry, however, is the directness of the expression of the poets' emotions. Later poets, largely because the tanka form was so short, tended to rely on suggestion to fill out what was actually stated, but the Man'yōshū poets, free to extend their poems beyond the five lines of a tanka, could give full vent to their feelings in a chōka. Eighteenth-century scholars of national learning referred to the “masculinity” (masuraoburi) of such expression and contrasted it with the “femininity” (tawayameburi) found in the later imperial collections. This is an oversimplification, but it accounts for the popularity of the Man'yōshū during the war years of 1941-45, when the “feminine” indirectness of the Kokinshū fell into disfavor, and innumerable studies of the “spirit” (seishin) of the Man'yōshū appeared.

The particular strength of the Man'yōshū poets was their ability to treat truly tragic, as opposed to merely sad emotions, and to confront harshly dramatic, as opposed to merely touching human experiences. For example, a fair number of poems describe the poet's reflections on seeing a dead body by the side of the road or on the shore. Dead bodies do not appear in the Kokinshū; the rules of good taste had come to dominate poetic composition, and the poets believed that the falling of the cherry blossoms, no less than the sight of a corpse, could stir in the beholder an awareness of the impermanence of this world. Some poems on cherry blossoms do indeed convey so poignant a sense of the passing of time as to bring tears to the reader's eyes, but the dramatic impact of falling cherry blossoms is obviously not as strong as that of the sight of a corpse washed by the waves.

The poems in the Man'yōshū fall into three main groups: love poems (sōmon), elegies (banka) and miscellaneous poems (zōka). Over half the poems in the collection are about love, most often described in terms of unhappy or frustrated love affairs; this is true also of the love poetry in later anthologies. The elegies are usually public poems that treat the deaths of members of the court and were probably written by court poets in response to commands of emperors or high officials, but some elegies are private, mourning the death of the wife or child of the poet. The public elegies were apparently composed in keeping with funerary practices observed during the seventh century. It was customary to place the body of a deceased member of the imperial family in a temporary shrine for an indeterminate period of time, during which the person was considered to be not dead but in a kind of limbo where he could hear words addressed to him. After 700, when the first recorded cremation occurred, poets were no longer called on to compose elegies in which they assured the dead that they would never be forgotten, thereby inducing them not to return to this world as malevolent spirits. The miscellaneous poems of the Man'yōshū are those that do not fit into either of the above two categories.

The greatest of the Man'yōshū poets, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, composed all of his datable works during a period of some ten years at the end of the seventh century. This corresponds to the reign of the Empress Jitō, who ascended the throne in 686 after the death of her husband, the Emperor Temmu, and who continued to rule until her death in 702 even after she formally yielded the throne to a young emperor. Little is known about Hitomaro's life, but we know from his poetry that he served Jitō as a poet laureate, accompanying her on her visits to Yoshino and elsewhere, and composing poetry commemorating such occasions. Hitomaro's devotion to Jitō and the rest of the imperial family was absolute; it can hardly be doubted that he believed in the divinity of the empress he served.

Hitomaro has been called a “professional court poet.” This should not suggest that he received payment for his poems; probably he depended financially on his stipend as an official, and wrote poetry because people at the court recognized his skill. In his elegies he expressed a grief that seems wholly appropriate and believable, though he may never have met the dead prince or princess he mourns. He certainly did not employ the conventional language one expects of a poet laureate who is obliged to produce a poem on state occasions even if they do not interest him. Ironically, Hitomaro is so convincing in his poems that describe matters he could not have known from personal experience that doubts have been expressed about the truthfulness of poems in which he narrates personal grief.

Regardless of the degree of literal truth in Hitomaro's poems, their poetic truth is incontestable. One theme runs through his poetry, a yearning for the past, and regret over what has disappeared. A sense of contrast between eternal nature and the transience of man gives poignancy to his observations and universality to his sorrow.

It was long customary to say that Yamabe no Akahito was the second most important poet of the Man'yōshū, but today at least two other Man'yōshū poets—Yamanoue no Okura and Ōtomo no Yakamochi—are ranked higher than Akahito. His reputation in the past owed much to his special mastery of the tanka, which became the standard verse form for a thousand years. Although thirteen of the fifty poems of Akahito in the Man'yōshū are chōka, they have not been praised nearly so much as the tanka—some, “envoys” (hanka), appended to his longer poems. His chōka on Yoshino, for example, is pleasant but unmemorable, and his mentions of the mountains and clear streams, lacking the specificity that Hitomaro would have given them, seem to have been chosen mainly to suggest the peace and prosperity of the reign. However, in the envoys Akahito beautifully evoked the atmosphere of Yoshino. He was especially admired by later poets because of his skill in conveying with the few words of a tanka the beauty of nature, the subject that most appealed to them; the grandeur of Hitomaro lay beyond their field of vision.

In contrast to the diminished reputation of Akahito, that of Yamanoue no Okura (660?-733?) has sharply risen in the twentieth century, and he now ranks second only to Hitomaro in the esteem he enjoys among general readers. His poems include examples (rare in Japanese literature of the past) with social and intellectual concerns. They are often introduced by prefaces in Chinese that explain the underlying philosophical truths, whether Confucian, Buddhist, or Taoist. This distinctiveness in Okura's poetry has been attributed to his birth in Korea. According to proponents of this theory, Okura and his father fled to Japan from the Korean kingdom of Paekche in 663, the year of the disastrous defeat of the Japanese army in Korea at Hakusukinoe. The main literary significance of this discovery, assuming it is true, is that Okura would have obtained from his father a better education in the Confucian classics and possibly in Buddhism than most Japanese of that time.

We possess almost no information about Okura before he was appointed in 701 as a member of an embassy to China. He was only a minor official, but probably his superior knowledge of Chinese earned him a position within the embassy. After his return to Japan, he rose slowly within the official hierarchy, finally becoming governor of Chikuzen in 725 or 726.

Okura's reputation is based mainly on three or four chōka that are unique among the poems of the Man'yōshū. The prefaces to the poems often state a didactic purpose that might not be apparent from the poems themselves. For example, the poem entitled “Poem to Set a Confused Heart Straight” bears this preface:

There is a certain type of man who knows he should honor his father and mother, but forgets to discharge his filial duties with devotion. He does not concern himself with his wife and children, but treats them more lightly than a pair of discarded shoes. … Though his spirit may soar free among the blue clouds, his body still remains among the dust of this world.

The poem contains an attack on the indifference to worldly obligations taught by the Taoists. It insists on both the family relationships dear to Confucianists and the ascetic discipline of the Buddhists.

Other poems by Okura treat such subjects as the impermanence of human life and the suffering that comes with old age. These themes were not unique to him, but Okura's expression is so powerful that any similarity in material to other poems in the Man'yōshū is quickly forgotten. His poem on the “difficulty of living in this world” contains this memorable passage:

Few are the nights they keep.
When, sliding back the plank doors,
They reach their beloved ones,
And sleep, arms intertwined,
Before, with staffs at their waists,
They totter along the road,
Laughed at here, and hated there.

The most celebrated of Okura's poems is his “Dialogue on Poverty.” The dialogue is between two men, the first a poor but proud man who wonders how people worse off than himself manage to survive, the second a destitute man who indirectly answers the first man's questions by describing his misery. During the next thousand years not another such poem would be composed in Japanese. Okura's ability to enter into the feelings of two persons who live under conditions he probably never himself experienced may have been fostered by observations he made when serving as the governor of a remote province. It is remarkable all the same that he should have thought two such unpoetic figures worthy of being described in a chōka.

The final period of the Man'yōshū was dominated by Ōtomo no Yakamochi. His poetry lacks the grandeur of Hitomaro's and the social concern of Okura's, but his voice is distinctive and the range of his poetry is exceptional. One of Yakamochi's best-known poems, favored especially during periods of nationalism, is the one he composed in 749 after the discovery of gold in the province of Mutsu. This was the first time gold had been found in Japan, and it could not have come at a more opportune time: the great statue of Buddha, erected in Nara by command of the Emperor Shōmu, could now be given a coating of gold. The emperor declared at the ceremonies during which the statue was consecrated that he was the “servant of the Three Treasures” of Buddhism. He also issued at this time a proclamation in which he quoted the oath of loyalty to the throne made centuries earlier by the Ōtomo family. Yakamochi was overcome by this recognition of the services rendered by his family, which despite its ancient lineage had suffered an eclipse, and in his chōka celebrating the discovery of gold he referred to his family's maxim of loyalty.

With the rise of the Fujiwara, a rival clan, the Ōtomo family once more fell into disfavor. Yakamochi did not suffer the severe punishment meted out to leaders of his family (on the grounds that they had forgotten their traditional obligation to defend the court), but in 758 he was appointed governor of Inaba, a remote and unimportant province. This was tantamount to exile; being an Ōtomo, even one uninvolved in politics, was a crime in the eyes of the Fujiwara. On New Year's Day of 759, at his post in Inaba, Yakamochi composed the tanka that is the last datable poem in the Man'yōshū. Yakamochi was in his forty-second year when he composed it, and lived twenty-six years longer, but no poems from this period of his life are known to survive.

His most appealing poems are three tanka composed in 753. Here is the third:

uraraka ni
tereru haruhi ni
hibari agari
kokoroganashi mo
hitori shi omoeba
In the tranquil sun of spring
A lark soars singing;
Sad is my burdened heart,
Thoughtful and alone.

This note is appended to the poem: “In the languid rays of the spring sun, a lark is singing. This mood of melancholy cannot be removed except by poetry: hence I have composed this poem in order to dispel my gloom.” Yakamochi is most attractive when he writes in this sort of private situation, rather than in response to a public occasion. His melancholy, stemming from vague sentiments of frustration and isolation, colors his best-known tanka, which are closer in tone to the poems of the Kokinshū than to the early Man'yōshū poetry.