[In the following excerpt, Wright comments on the prevalence of love poetry in the Manyoshu.]

The Manyōshū “needs no apologies,” Donald Keene writes in the introduction to his Anthology of Japanese Literature. “It is one of the world's great collections of poetry.”¹ The title of this outstanding work, Manyōshū, translates literally as “A Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” but through implication Manyōshū can also mean “A Collection for Myriad Ages.” Compiled in its final form during the eighth century, the anthology contains 4,516 poems arranged in twenty volumes. Embodying strength of feeling, sincerity, and simplicity, these poems have been honored as the purest expression of the early Japanese spirit.

Much of the Manyōshū's richness is derived from the varied backgrounds of its over four hundred known contributors, not to mention the innumerable anonymous poets whose work is included in the collection. Noble sentiments of those residing in the court are found next to the rustic expressions of frontier guards stationed at lonely outposts. Folk songs, poems in praise of saké, longer poems on legendary themes, and even bawdy pieces find a place beside scenic descriptions and reflective poems. Whole sections of the work deal with the recurring themes of love's sensuality and spirituality, and the sorrow of separation.

Poetry was a basic form of communication between lovers, who were not always permitted to meet as frequently or as openly as they might have wished. The theme of separation persists throughout the poetry of early Japan, and indeed contemporary readers may be left with the feeling that early Japanese lovers spent more time apart than together. Instead of a more direct expression of the pleasurable joys of love, the poetic communications of the time seem to dwell on the sadness of “longing for love.”

In this early period Japan was growing, under the cultural influence of China, into a more solidified nation-state in which the family was becoming a rigid social unit. Once the imperial family had established itself, in terms of divine and secular power, as the centralized authority of the island nation, marriage was openly used as a political device to aid other powerful families or clans to move further upwards toward the ultimate source of imperial power. Having a daughter married to the emperor was the ambition of many aristocrats, for in this way a man might see his own grandson ascend the throne. “Marriage politics” can be seen as a vestige of an earlier time in which the youth of various clans were traded as hostages in an attempt to solidify and to unify power among the struggling families. Consequently, men and women often were not permitted to marry or to have open relationships with those most attractive to them for fear of jeopardizing, not only their own names, but the shaky political unions of the time. “Gossip,” then, was not merely the idle amusement of the leisure class; a scandal could lead to the downfall of the holders of power.

Within the love poems themselves, references can be found to leaving one's own legal wife in the pre-dawn hours for fear of being seen. Perhaps due to Japan's matriarchal past, men and women, even though officially married, lived in separate dwellings. Japan, during the eighth century, was moving towards a more patriarchal model, but it would be centuries before the Japanese woman would be forced to surrender title, name, and home in marriage with a man and his family not of her own choosing. Women of the Manyōshū were still independent enough to retain their own identities and residences. These aristocratic women did not, however, live alone. Extended family and groups of ladies-in-waiting lived and slept in collective units. Prying eyes were everywhere. Confucian morality put pressure on women to remain chaste and faithful, but that confining philosophy never made many inroads into the sexual mores of the Japanese man. The Manyō male lover, at least, was probably seeing several women in addition to his wife or wives, and he certainly didn't want the ladies to know too clearly where he spent each night, when they were having to “pass the long nights alone.”

Some ancient Japanese documents suggest that the Japanese love poem sprang out of occasional songfests associated with Shinto fertility rites of the distant past. At designated times the young people in a community would be permitted to go off to a hillside or to the grounds of a Shinto shrine to woo one another with song. By the eighth century, however, such carefree evenings of song and love were being condemned, at least in court circles, and only the man was free to roam the streets in “longing for love.” After the popularization, too, of a writing system initially borrowed from China, it was the song or poem alone that remained from the song-fest past. Spontaneous songs of a former period of history were transformed by the literate society of the eighth century into composed written statements of desire. But Confucian imposed morality was not the single reason for the persistent theme of separation in the love poetry of the day. At the time of the movement towards nation-state politics, there were whole areas of Japan where the “barbarians” had not yet come under complete control of the Nara Court. Wars and military occupations of disputed territory were still being carried out in the hinterlands. Frontier guards were continually being sent out to hold or to conquer territory. Many poems of longing or separation were written between these men and their women at home. Poem 41 in this volume is one example:

We have received
          our Imperial Orders
                    and from tomorrow
We will sleep among the reeds
          while our wives remain behind

Many of the Manyōshū love poems selected for this present collection were written in and around the capital city of Nara, and many of the individual poems were either written to or by one man, Ōtomo Yakamochi (716-785), who is believed by some scholars to have actually compiled the anthology. His influence in the Manyōshū was certainly important—in more than one way. His own aunt, Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoé (dates unknown) seems to have been involved romantically with him. In poem 89 she says:

Since you did not come
          by the time the moon of pearl
                    had fully risen
I had then to dream of you
          to give you the love I felt

Later, Yakamochi became involved with his cousin, the above lady's daughter, and eventually married her. She is known only as “Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoé's Elder Daughter” (dates unknown). She wrote, apparently one lonely night, poem 13:

Mist drifts in layers
          over Mt. Kasuga's crest
                    yet the lovely moon
Dimly glows all through the night
          and I must sleep alone

Perhaps, through gossip, this wife may have learned of the affair between her husband and a Lady Ki (dates unknown) who addressed the popular Yakamochi with similar sentiments in poem 8:

If the night is dark
          you won't visit me, of course,
                    but when the plum
Is in bloom beneath the moon
          won't you come to be with me?

Perhaps, too, the wife may have suspected Lady Kasa (dates unknown) who has over twenty pleas for Yakamochi's attention recorded in the Manyōshū. He, however, only replied to her poetry twice. On one occasion, she, seeming to give up on the one-sided affair, wrote in poem 132:

To love someone
          who does not return that love
                    is like offering prayers
Back behind a starving god
          within a Buddhist temple

The love poems in this volume were all written originally in the tanka (also called waka), which is a thirty-one syllable form subdivided into five units of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively. Other forms of poetry were included in the Manyōshū, such as the thirty-eight syllable sedōka (divided into units of five, seven, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively) and occasionally the much longer choka (made up of units of five and seven syllables that could alternate in up to one hundred lines, ending with a final couplet of seven, seven syllables). It was the thirty-one syllable tanka, however, that came to be the preferred form, especially as a medium for communicating love, and it is the only form of the three that remained popular beyond the eighth century. Along with the later seventeen syllable haiku, the tanka is still used today.

In the present translations an attempt is made to approximate the original syllabics of the eighth-century poems. Not all lines have been made up of rigidly structured groupings of five or seven syllables, however. In making the translation the flow of an individual line or group of lines has been given more importance than the mathematical tabulation of sounds.

The format of the original Manyōshū collection did not follow an organized or thematic plan, such as characterizes the later imperial collections of Japanese poetry. These anthologies of the tenth through the thirteenth centuries were arranged to provide a poetic sequence ordered by association and progression. Following the spirit of this model, without rigidly adhering to its elaborate rules, the poems in this volume have been arranged in a thematic sequence.

Notes

1. Keene, Donald, Anthology of Japanese Literature. New York: Grove Press, 1955.