SOURCE: An introduction to The Ten Thousand Leaves, Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 3-33.

[In the following excerpt, Levy describes the nature of Japanese poetry and profiles Hitomaro and other important contributors to the Manyoshu.]

The Ten Thousand Leaves is Japan's first anthology of poetry and, to over a millennium of critical opinion, the greatest. Like the works of Homer for the West, like The Book of Songs for China, it represents both the classical fount of poetry and a model of expressive energy never surpassed.

As its name—Man'yōshū, literally “the collection of ten thousand leaves”—suggests, this is the “anthology of all anthologies” from the Asuka and Nara periods, which saw the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan. Apart from a few poems attributed to legendary times, and some others which may possibly be additions from as late as the ninth century, The Ten Thousand Leaves is a collection of poetry written from the second quarter of the seventh century to the middle of the eighth. The last specifically dated poem was composed in 759.

The Ten Thousand Leaves is a vast work, comprising 4,516 poems in twenty “books” (maki, or “scrolls”). In them are represented over 400 named poets, and countless hundreds of others who composed the anonymous poems which make up more than half of the collection. The variety is astonishing, ranging from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the “poems of the frontier guardsmen” and the rustic “poems of the Eastland” in provincial dialect.

It is difficult to characterize The Ten Thousand Leaves as a whole, although many have tried. Some have spoken of it as a work of simple clarity, mainly in contrast to the sophisticated word play which is often such an important element in later Japanese poetry. Yet it includes poems of great length and structural intricacy, expressing a purely lyrical impulse—almost entirely free of discursive abstraction—on a scale rarely found in Western poetry. Some stress the fact that The Ten Thousand Leaves preserves a “pure” Japanese voice at a time of enthusiastic borrowing from China and Korea. Yet the mix of Chinese characters used semantically and phonetically in The Ten Thousand Leaves is strikingly similar to the script used in recording Korean poetry at the time, and the collection includes several Confucian and Taoist expositions, written entirely in Chinese, among poems which seem to come straight out of primitive Shinto.

The Ten Thousand Leaves is, above all, a representative work, a culling of many different styles of verbal expression from a period of dramatic cultural growth parallelled in Japanese history perhaps only by the last hundred years. The seventh and eighth centuries saw the first attempts to create a national entity, centered on a political cult of the Emperor, out of the archaic coalition of clans which “Japan” had been. They witnessed the birth of Japanese art in that Buddhist sculpture and architecture which reveals, in the tapered lines of Bodhisattva torsos and the entasis of temple pillars, a distant Greek inspiration, reborn in wood and painted in the colors of a new faith accrued in its millennial journey across the Asian continent. And surely the most remarkable development of this time was the rise of an urban civilization literally out of the rice paddies—the Fujiwara capital of the 690's, Japan's first large-scale “city,” and the great capital at Nara, founded in 710 and laid out in broad symmetrical avenues that stretched across the northern arc of the Yamato basin in a reach for the grandeur of T'ang China.

But The Ten Thousand Leaves is its own monument. The number of “Buddhist poems” in the collection—from an age in which the entire nation's treasure was poured into the construction of the Great Buddha at the Tōdaiji temple—can be counted on one hand. The civilization of Asuka and Nara did not use its native verse to commemorate its achievements in other fields, but allowed it to grow in its own indigenous directions as poetry. Thus, for example, even as the Japanese grew adept at writing historical prose studded with the most sophisticated Chinese rhetorical embellishments, a poet like Kakinomoto Hitomaro could write a lengthy war scene (in II. 199) whose conception owes much to the Chinese Histories, yet write it entirely in Japanese verse, one hypotactic sentence rich with inflections and original metaphors—and without a single Chinese word.

The Ten Thousand Leaves is a chorus of lyrical voices born from out of a tradition of ritual verbal art that stretches back into Japan's pre-literature centuries, back into myth itself. The earliest poems in the collection are similar to many of the folk poems recorded in Japan's oldest books, those melanges of history and myth called the Kojiki (“The Record of Ancient Matters,” 712) and the Nihonshoki (“The Records of Japan,” 720). Like the archaic songs, they are built around expressions in the collective voice and eternal time of the ritual. The Ten Thousand Leaves opens with a poem attributed to Emperor Yūryaku (the traditional dates of his reign are 456-479). It begins with an amatory appeal:

Girl with your basket,
          with your pretty basket,
with your shovel,
          your pretty shovel,
gathering shoots on the hillside here,
I want to ask your home.
Tell me your name!

Then what apparently was originally a folk poem, rewritten for the imperial speaker, climaxes with the Emperor's statement of his identity with the land:

This land of Yamato,
          seen by the gods on high—
it is all my realm,
in all of it I am supreme.
I will tell you
my home and my name.

This is a mythic statement, the imprint in language of the collective existence of the clan, not the lovesong of an individual man. Similarly, when the Emperor Jomei (reigned 629-642) climbs to the summit of Kagu Hill, his view of his realm (I.2) is not a literal survey of the actual fields below but an eternal vision of ritual symmetry, in which

          On the plain of land,
smoke from the hearths rises, rises.
          On the plain of waters,
gulls rise one after another.

After this couplet, which seems to be molded both by the example of the imagistic parallel couplet in Chinese Six Dynasties verse and by a native ritual division of the earth into its dual bounties of land and sea (which overrides the literal fact that there are neither sea nor gulls in inland Yamato), the Emperor concludes with ceremonial praise:

A splendid land
          is the dragonfly island,
the land of Yamato.

Yamato, the land of these Emperors, is the rich, fertile basin in western Honshu where Japan's civilization was born. Its name seems to have the etymological implication of “the place between the mountains.” Many poems in The Ten Thousand Leaves refer to the fact that Yamato could be entered or left only by crossing the surrounding mountains. With very few exceptions, the early Japanese Court was located on various sites within and around the Asuka valley, tucked in the southeastern corner of the Yamato Basin. The palace was rebuilt on a new site following the decease of an Emperor (in order to avoid the pollution of death), but the new site was almost always kept in or near Asuka until 710, when the capital was transferred to Nara in northern Yamato.

The sense of the sacredness of Yamato may be traced to the common mythic birth of the land and its ancestral inhabitants, as recorded in the animistic genealogy of the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki. It is this animistic sensibility which lies behind the patterned, ritual evocations of the land in early poetry. Here are statements of an unchanging, and essentially religious, truth that exists in the collective mind of the clan. It is the Emperor's function as chief ritualist to pronounce it.

But already in the 640's, no more than a few years after Emperor Jomei's vision of Yamato's splendor in its eternal dual symmetry, we find the beginnings of a different kind of poetic statement, one in which a unique event in a specific, real time is recaptured in the memory of a poet composing as an individual. Princess Nukada, relating an imperial excursion, writes:

I remember
our temporary shelter
by Uji's palace ground,
when we cut the splendid grass
          from the autumn fields
and sojourned under thatch.

(I.7)

Here, in place of the “preestablished harmony” of ritual in a realm outside the ordinary bounds of time, is a procession of memory through its constituent images, details which are chosen by the poet's aesthetic consciousness from her own past experience. We know almost nothing about this woman who was Japan's first lyric poet. She may have been of Korean origin (as a good number of the Japanese cultural elite apparently were at this time), and she certainly was a central figure in the poetry circle which flourished during the reign of Emperor Tenji (661-671). Tenji was an enthusiastic student of Chinese literature under whose patronage continental scholars came to teach at the Japanese Court, armed with copies of the great Chinese anthology of poetry and prose, the Wen Hsuan.

One result was the beginning of kanshi, poetry written by the Japanese in the Chinese language. The preface to the Kaifūsō (751), the first anthology of kanshi, tells us that Emperor Tenji “from time to time invited men of literature to Court, and held banquets with sweet wine,” that on these occasions “the Sovereign himself wrote literature, and his wise Ministers wrote odes of praise,” and that “the phrases they carved and the beautiful tracings of their brushes exceeded a mere hundred.”

Most of what the Japanese Court actually wrote in Chinese sounds derivative and stilted today. But far more important than their actual compositions in the foreign verse is the fact that the stimulation of this contact with Chinese literature seems to have given birth to a consciousness of verbal expression as a specifically aesthetic, rather than ritual, medium, and that this consciousness was applied to writing in Japanese as well. The result is most apparent in Princess Nukada's work from this period, especially her renowned poem comparing the beauty of spring and autumn (I.16). Here a parallellistic evocation of the two seasons leads to a judgment that is entirely aesthetic. Nukada first speaks of spring being so lush that its glories cannot be fully appreciated:

But, the hillsides being overgrown,
          I may go among the foliage
          yet cannot pick the flowers.
The grass being rank,
          I may pick
          yet cannot examine them.

She then states a personal choice for the subtler and more penetrable season, a choice which would be the standard Japanese preference for the next thirteen centuries:

Looking at the leaves
          on the autumn hillsides,
I pick the yellowed ones
          and admire them,
leaving the green ones
          there with a sigh.
That is my regret.
But the autumn hills are for me.

“But the autumn hills are for me.” Akiyama ware wa: there is a tone of almost triumphant subjectivity here as nature is penetrated by the poet's emotions, admiring, sighing, regretting.

As with other poems from this time, the structural effect is one of symmetrical accretion, a style of imagination associated with the visual aesthetics of the age—couplets aligned with a perfect simplicity like the three symmetrical stories of the late seventh-century Yakushiji pagoda. Within that structure, the land that in ritual verse had been an affirmative reflection of the Emperor's power, an absolutely symbolic entity beyond the whims of season or emotion, has been raked by the poet's own sense of form into a landscape.

By the time that nature was yielding to Princess Nukada's aesthetic judgments, the poetry of Yamato had found its basic formal elements. Lacking both meter and rhyme, classical Japanese verse is based instead on a rhythm of phrases with alternating numbers of syllables. Already in the archaic songs included in the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki we find patterns of long/short alternation—phrases of four syllables alternating with phrases of six, phrases of five syllables alternating with phrases of three, etc. By the middle of the seventh century this has largely settled into the five syllable/seven syllable rhythm which would rule Japanese poetic expression until modern times.

The two major forms in which the poets of The Ten Thousand Leaves composed are the chōka (“long poem”) and the tanka (“short poem”). The chōka consists of a number of alternating five/seven phrases ending with a final seven/seven couplet:

5/7/5/7/5 … 7/7

The number of five/seven phrases in a “long poem” ranges from a few to over a hundred (the chōka of Kakinomoto Hitomaro, especially, are examples of the form as sustained to a magnificent length). There are 260 chōka in The Ten Thousand Leaves.

The tanka consists of thirty-one syllables, arranged

5/7/5/7/7

It is easy to infer from this construction of the tanka, in five phrases identical to the final five of the chōka, that the shorter form is a crystallization of the chōka ending. Some recent Japanese scholarship suggests, however, that the tanka originated from an older form of verse called the sedōka, of which there are sixty examples in the anthology. The sedōka has a rhythm of

5/7/7/5/7/7

This repetition of two triplets is thought to be a characteristic of collective, popular song, making it easily chantable (often as a folk dialog). With the third phrase removed, however, it becomes

5/7/5/7/7

i.e., a tanka. In doing so, the form has lost its simple fluidity and gained instead a tension more suited to a sophisticated lyrical expression.

The Ten Thousand Leaves also includes a single example of the bussokusekika, the “Buddha's foot stone poem.” There are twenty-one other examples of these poems on the back of a stone in the precincts of the Yakushiji temple, on the front of which is etched the shape of the Buddha's foot. They are tanka to which an extra final phrase of seven syllables has been added (5/7/5/7/7/7), and generally not considered an independent form.

As the chōka waned in the eighth century, the tanka grew in importance. Approximately 4,200 of the 4,516 poems in The Ten Thousand Leaves are tanka. After The Ten Thousand Leaves the chōka disappeared as a viable form of poetry, and the tanka became the exclusive form until the rise of the haiku (with a 5/7/5 rhythm) in the seventeenth century.

Attached to most of the chōka in The Ten Thousand Leaves are sattelite verses, in tanka form, called hanka or “envoys” (literally “repeating poems”). The envoy takes an imagistic or emotive theme from the chōka, often the lyrical statement which climaxes the longer poem, and brings it to a new expressive realization which in some cases is a fuller one than that in the chōka itself. This lyrical use of the tanka as envoy seems to be one reason for the development of the shorter form into its ultimate prominence as the vessel of the Japanese poetic impulse.

The relationship between the chōka and its tanka envoys appears to be a key to understanding the work of Kakinomoto Hitomaro. Hitomaro is unquestionably the greatest poet of The Ten Thousand Leaves and, with Matsuo Bashō, who created the haiku as a form of art in the seventeenth century, one of the two most important figures in the history of Japanese poetry. Hitomaro's first recorded work is a chōka lament upon the sudden death of Crown Prince Kusakabe in 689, shortly before he was scheduled to assume the throne. Hitomaro's chōka (II.167) was composed for the Prince's “temporary enshrinement,” during which various ceremonial tributes were intoned before the imperial bier prior to final burial. The poem moves, with an unprecedented scale and complexity, from a mythic panorama of the divine descent of the Emperors to an expression of earth's anticipation of the coming reign. These hopes are crushed by the Crown Prince's death, perceived as an unfathomable, even unreasonable, act of imperial will. The opening passage is an incremental cumulation of mythic images, echoing each other in a way that the twentieth-century tanka poet Saitō Mōkichi called “symphonic”:

In the beginning
of heaven and earth,
on the riverbanks
of the far firmament,
the eight million deities,
the ten million deities
gathered in godly assembly
and held divine counsel

These are Hitomaro's engines of heaven, and the chōka descends from them to terrestial metaphors, then to an expression of the public national grief, and finally to a blank lyrical statement of human bereavement:

Now many days and months have passed
since the voice of his morning commandments
fell silent,
and the Prince's courtiers
do not know which way to turn.

The courtiers' grief and bewilderment is then given its own voice in two envoys:

That the palace
of the Prince I held in awe
as I would look up
to the far firmament
should fall to ruins—
alas!
The crimson-gleaming sun
still shines,
but that the moon is hidden
in the pitch-black night it crosses—
alas!

(II.168 and 169)

Both of these tanka present celestial images, symbolizing the mythic dimension of the Prince's death, which then lead to human cries of loss. They are repeating the poetic logic of the chōka itself in miniature, but with a heightened emotional intensity and directness. In Hitomaro's first appearance in The Ten Thousand Leaves he has opened up the chōka, and in his hands the form takes on a scale and elasticity it has never known before. And, by subjecting the tanka as envoy to the task of echoing the motive tension of the chōka, he is bringing the shorter poem to its own power as an independent, highly compacted lyrical form.

These two envoys are succeeded by twenty-four other tanka of bereavement. The first of these (II.170) is specifically attributed to Hitomaro, the others to the dead Prince's personal servingmen. But there can be little doubt that Hitomaro had a hand in the composition of the set. It is one of the earliest examples of a collective lyrical effort, a phenomenon which would be seen again in the banquet poetry of the eighth century. And it presages the development of the renga form in later centuries, in which tanka by several poets are integrated into a single collective composition.

Hitomaro is a poet without a biography. The only information we have about him comes from his poems and their headnotes in The Ten Thousand Leaves itself. We do know that the Kakinomoto clan was an old Yamato family, and one school of thought, represented by the late Orikuchi Shinobu, speculates that they were ceremonial reciters of ritual songs. Genealogical background may explain the only real “fact” we know about Hitomaro, his service to the Court (apparently with very low rank) as a composer of poems of praise and lament for the imperial family. It cannot, however, “explain” the conscious mind, with its own awareness of history, or the personal voice that begins to be heard from the suddenly expanded edifice of ritual language.

Hitomaro's first recorded step as a poet is a step backward, a rhetorical evocation of the mythic world, in whose eternal time the descent of the first Emperor from the “fields of heaven” is identical to the enthronement of the latest sovereign at the palace in Asuka. Hitomaro's task as a Court poet was one of crafting iconic images which “prove” the divinity of the imperial family. It was a task whose political basis may be traced back to two poems written following the victory of Emperor Tenji's younger brother in the succesion dispute, known as the Jinshin War, which broke out after Tenji's death in 671. Upon defeating the forces of Tenji's son, this prince assumed the throne as Emperor Temmu in 673. Two tanka glorify Temmu's construction of his new palace in Asuka as a divine act. Here we find for the first time the words kami ni shi maseba, an explicit rhetorical device meaning “(because he is) a very god”:

Our Emperor,
a very god,
has turned the fields
where red steeds wandered
into his capital city.
Our Lord,
a very god,
has turned the marshes
where nested flocks of waterfowl
into his imperial city.

(XIX.4260 and 4261)

It is not the divinity of the Emperor which is new here, but the need to establish it explicitly in rhetorical language. This is a theme which Hitomaro would use in his iconic poetry. The simplest example is his turning a procession to Ikazuchi Hill by Empress Jitō, Temmu's widow and successor following the death of the Crown Prince, into a divine ascent, based on a conceit on the name “Ikazuchi,” which means “thunder”:

Our Lord,
a very god,
builds her lodge
above the thunder
by the heavenly clouds.

(II.235)

Many of Hitomaro's poems of praise are in the context of the imperial procession, a public, ritual event. They form the celebratory aspect of the same collective emotions of fealty which are expressed as cries of bereavement in the (equally public and ritual) laments for the imperial family.

The lament which Hitomaro composed upon the death of Prince Takechi in 696 (II. 199) is the longest chōka remaining. In its 149 phrases, all without a single Chinese word, is the battle scene which describes the Jinshin War. With the drumbeats that “boomed in our ears / like the very voice of thunder” and the arrows that “swarmed like a blinding swirl of snow,” it is the single passage in Japanese poetry that comes closest to an “epic” style. It is not, however, an “epic” in the Western sense, for the extraordinary narrative power of the passage is folded into a larger scheme of collective lyricism. After the final procession to the Prince's tomb, the collective “we” of this lyric voice gaze back at the palace the Prince has left behind, vowing (did Hitomaro really believe it?) that it at least will last “ten thousand generations.” The ending of the chōka and the envoys which follow express that typical situation of the bereaved courtiers—stunned and directionless as their ritual existence is robbed of its eternal justification. When the last procession breaks up, the courtiers who had lined up in their majestic, symmetrical ranks are left to wander lost in the present.

Not knowing where they will drift,
like the hidden puddles that run
on the banks of Haniyasu Pond,
the servingmen stand bewildered.

(II.201)

The celebratory obverse of Hitomaro's masterpiece of public despair are the two chōka, each with an envoy (I.36-39), he composed at the time of a procession by Empress Jitō to the detached palace on the banks of the Yoshino River in the mountains south of Yamato. These are Hitomaro's greatest achievements as provider of joyous icons of imperial glory. Here the establishment of imperial divinity assumes a specifically aesthetic dimension, achieved through a parallelistic manipulation of the landscape. Echoing Emperor Jomei's ritual assertion of Yamato's splendor half a century earlier, the Empress, among all her lands, “finds Yoshino good.” But Hitomaro provides the aesthetic reason: “for its crystal riverland among the mountains.” The Empress gazes down from her “blossom-strewn” dais at the orchestrated movements of boats on patterned currents:

And so the courtiers of the great palace,
its ramparts thick with stone,
line their boats
to cross the morning river,
race their boats
across the evening river.
Like this river
never ending,
like these mountains
commanding ever greater heights,
the palace by the surging rapids—
though I gaze on it, I do not tire.

(I.36)

This structuring of nature is like that in Princess Nukada's experiments in symmetry, except that here the land-scape is peopled with courtiers, those ever-present extras in Hitomaro's ritual parades. Here the “proof” of the Empress' divinity is the very offering of this aesthetic order to her, both figuratively by the courtiers in the poem and literally by Hitomaro's presentation to her of a chōka which artistically ratifies her political splendor.

In the lyrical envoy which follows (I.37), Hitomaro hopes he can return to the scene of his ritual panorama as constantly as “the eternal moss / slick by the Yoshino River.” Empress Jitō is actually recorded to have made thirty-one processions to Yoshino during her reign, and Hitomaro's expression of his own hope to return there seems to be overlapped with hers. Hitomaro is aware of what Yoshino has meant to this woman, who took refuge there during the Jinshin War with her husband Temmu and her son Kusakabe, both of them dead now. The chōka's iconic portrayal of the Empress on her lofty dais seems to yield, in the tanka, to the hint of a personality, the shadow of a widow's mien.

This suggestion of character in a portrayal of an imperial figure is a development which becomes fully apparent in Hitomaro's poems (chōka and tanka) on a procession by Prince Karu, the dead Kusakabe's son, to the hunting fields of Aki. The chōka (I.45) begins with an iconic display of imperial power, as the eleven-year-old prince “manifests his divine will” and

pushes through the mountains
of Hatsuse, the hidden land,
and bids yield to him
the rough mountain road,
lined with thick black pines,
and the cliffs and the trees
that block his path.

This objective glorification, at the same time suggestive of a personal reason for the Prince's determination, then gives way to an image of the boy searching for his father's soul, as the chōka ends with a lyrical portrayal of the child lost in the subjective act of memory:

Grass for pillow,
he sojourns the night,
thinking of the past.

The tanka which “repeats” this situation turns the Prince even more into a character by detailing his motivation, by attributing to the semi-divine object of praise a psyche:

The traveler sojourning
on the fields of Aki
stretches as in sleep,
yet he cannot sleep,
thinking of the past.

(I.46)

This is succeeded by three more tanka, in which the content of “the past,” the symbolic mission of the procession—a reconnection with the dead Prince Kusakabe's soul—is made explicit. In the last of these tanka, the past is delivered to the present as images of the dead and the living are united in what Proust would have called their “common essence”:

The time—
when the Crown Prince,
          Peer of the Sun,
lined his horses and set out
on the imperial hunt—
comes and faces me.

(I.49)

Within this remarkable conception of “time”—time given a spatial motion—the “common essence” linking the dead father and the living son, bringing them together “liberated from the contingencies of time,” is none other than the position of each at the head of a hunting procession, the ritual stance itself.

The early history of Japanese poetry is a circle. Beginning with the naive ritual expression in an eternal time, it then develops a specifically aesthetic vision outside the bounds of ritual. With Hitomaro, it makes a conscious return to the ritual context. Finally, it uses that occasion for a daring imagistic transportation of the eternal realm of the imperial dead into commune with the present.

Hitomaro's exploitation of the ritual situation for lyrical purposes far more ambitious than Princess Nukada's is probably the most decisive act in the creation of Japanese poetry. Not only did he further develop the psychological portrayal of princes and princesses in their personal bereavement, but he also used “public” formulas and imagistic situations in his own “private” verse. Nakanishi Susumu, Japan's foremost living authority on The Ten Thousand Leaves, has pointed to the similarity between the description of Prince Karu as he “pushed through the mountains” in his symbolic quest for his dead father and Hitomaro's description of his own search on the mountain, in the stark and powerful ending of the first of two chōka “as he shed tears of blood following the death of his wife” (II.213):

I struggled up here,
kicking the rocks apart,
but it did not good:
my wife, whom I thought
was of this world,
is ash.

There is a high degree of imagistic and formulaic interplay within Hitomaro's poetry. It occurs not only between “public” and “private” expressions, but also between the three classical thematic categories of The Ten Thousand Leaves. These are “Poems on Various Themes” (Zōka), “Personal Exchanges” (Sōmon), and “Laments” (Banka, literally “coffin-pulling poems”). They largely consist, respectively, of the poetry of celebration, the poetry of longing, and the poetry of bereavement. Thus the “lament” often cited as Hitomaro's masterpiece, his chōka “upon seeing a dead man lying among the rocks on the island of Samine in Sanuki” (II.220), begins with a panoramic ritual celebration of the land:

Eternally flourishing,
          with the heavens
                    and the earth,
          with the sun
                    and the moon,
the very face of a god—

Following this is a narrative description of the poet's journey through the Inland Sea to the island of Samine, where he discovers the corpse

lying there
on a jagged bed of stones,
the beach
          for your finely woven pillow,
by the breakers' roar.

The chōka then climaxes with an image of longing for the lover who is on a journey—a typical situation in the “Personal Exchanges”—as Hitomaro ends his address to the dead man:

If your wife knew,
she would come and seek you out.
But she does not even know the road,
          straight as a jade spear.
Does she not wait for you,
          worrying and longing,
your beloved wife?

Finally, having humanized the imperial demigods in his public chōka, Hitomaro manages now, in the second envoy succeeding this poem, to describe this lowly anonymous traveller with a sense of humanistic awe that almost suggests divinity:

Making a finely woven pillow
of the rocky shore
          where waves from the offing
                    draw near,
you, who sleep there!

(II.222)

Immediately following this exclamation of sympathy, heightened by Hitomaro's awareness of his own perilous journey, is another “journey poem,” this time “by Kakinomoto Hitomaro in his own sorrow as he was about to die in the land of Iwami”:

Not knowing I am pillowed
among the crags on Kamo Mountain,
my wife must still be waiting
                    for my return.

(II.223)

This poem places Hitomaro in the same situation, with the same emotional overtones of longing and bereavement, as the dead man in his masterpiece. And it is followed by two poems in which his wife “responds,” in “Personal Exchange” style, to his death poem. Her “responses” (which have him “strewn with the shells of Ishi River”) are in turn followed by a poem in which another poet, “answering her with Hitomaro's supposed feelings,” has Hitomaro “pillowed here beside the gems tossed ashore in the surging waves.” Finally, this is followed by a variant similar to a poem Hitomaro wrote upon the death of an earlier wife!

It is clear from this spate of poetry, with all the different “explanations” of his death, that Hitomaro had already become a legend by the time his works passed into history (sometime after the first decade of the eighth century). His “biography” is already inextricable from the content of his poetry, as he becomes the object of his own lament and the world responds with elegiac repartee.

In addition to the sixteen chōka and sixty-three tanka (plus their variants) specifically recorded as being “written by Kakinomoto Hitomaro,” The Ten Thousand Leaves also includes 330 tanka, thirty-five sedōka, and two chōka in what is known as “The Hitomaro Collection.” A large number of these poems are not by Hitomaro. Other than a few poems which are obviously anachronistic, it is virtually impossible to distinguish which are by Hitomaro and which were merely attributed to him either because of a sensed similarity to his work or by a desire to associate a work with the glory of his already legendary name. Among “The Hitomaro Collection”—especially in Books Seven and Nine of The Ten Thousand Leaves—are found some of the finest achievements in the tanka form.

Hitomaro, as the creator of a full Japanese lyricism, is the hero of The Ten Thousand Leaves, and the central figure of its first three books, which represent the classical core of the anthology. Book One is a historical anthology of “Poems on Various Themes.” Book Two, also arranged by historical periods, consists of “Personal Exchanges” and “Laments,” while Book Three is a collection of all three categories (with the “Personal Exchanges” renamed “Metaphorical Poems”).

Among the other poets represented in Book Three, Takechi Kurohito, a contemporary of Hitomaro, is important for his development of a personal voice in travel poetry. It is the lonely voice of the courtier who must journey away from the Court, who is forced to perceive nature outside its ceremonial contours.

Yamabe Akahito, who flourished in the generation of poets following Hitomaro's death, is also famous for his nature poetry. Many of his superbly crafted landscapes strive for the ritual pattern that Hitomaro attained in his “Yoshino” poems. But already by the first half of the eighth century the mythic intensity of Hitomaro's age is gone. In its place is an intricately realized objectivity (much admired by the early pioneers of modern Japanese poetry), images revealed within a motion which may be called “cinematic”:

Coming out
          from Tago's nestled cove,
I gaze:
                    white, pure white
the snow has fallen
on Fuji's lofty peak.

(III.318)

Book Four consists entirely of “Personal Exchanges,” and Hitomaro is represented here as well, although not as prominently as in the first three books. The key word in the “Personal Exchanges” is koi. Often mistranslated as “love,” its true meaning is “longing,” a longing that, almost by definition, never attains its goal. The result is a diffuse, and invariably frustrated, eroticism that spreads over the world like a warm spring haze. Poem after poem speaks of gossip, of the prying eyes of men, of the inner intensity of passion concealed from others.

This is a land of fearful gossip!
Do not show your emotion,
do not be revealed in scarlet hues,
even if the longing kills you.

(IV.683)

The eroticism of The Ten Thousand Leaves is also highly formulaic. We will find an extremely passionate expression used in one poem for what seems to be a sexual repartee, and in another for a casual greeting between friends. But threading through all of the occasions of “personal exchange,” whether specifically sexual or not, is a sense of the quality of longing itself. Its object is often a dreamlike, ambiguous image that appears to respond, but never with a definite yes or no.

Will I go on
merely hearing of you from afar—
          like the cranes that seem
          to cry in the dark night—
never meeting you?

(IV.592)

Both of these poems are from series of compositions by a single poet, the first from “Seven poems by Lady Ōtomo Sakanoue” (IV.683-689), the second from “Twenty-four poems sent to Ōtomo Yakamochi by Lady Kasa” (IV.587-610). The serialization of poetry in the “Personal Exchanges” suggests that, already by the eighth century, Japanese poets are aware that the collection is artistically greater than the sum of its individual tanka, a consciousness of anthology itself as an organizing aesthetic principle. This organizational impulse, whether applied to individual or to collective composition, would be important for the compilation of The Ten Thousand Leaves itself, and for the imperial anthologies which form the landmarks of Japanese poetry in the succeeding centuries.

This consciousness seems to be especially at work in the compositions of Ōtomo Yakamochi, the young courtier to whom so much of the longing in Book Four is addressed. Yakamochi was the son of Ōtomo Tabito, and he grew up under the influence of the poetry circle his father led at the Dazaifu military headquarters in Kyushu (the works of which are recorded in Book Five). Yakamochi is the most prolific poet in The Ten Thousand Leaves, represented by 426 tanka, forty-six chōka, and one sedōka; most of his poems are in Books Seventeen through Twenty. Yakamochi is thought to have been one of the major compilers of The Ten Thousand Leaves. Along with his own poetry, he is important for having collected the “poems of the frontier guardsmen” in Book Twenty.

In Yakamochi's “Personal Exchanges” in Book Four, we can already see the “diaristic” quality that would characterize the great threads of self-consciousness, minute and exact, of his mature poetry in the last four books of the anthology. A strand of tanka from a series of fifteen he sent as part of an exchange with “the elder daughter of the Sakanoue house” (IV.741-755) suggests, along with a lyrical appeal to the girl, a journal of his own consciousness tortured with erotic yearning:

750

My desire had died,
I passed the time in quiet loneliness.
But then what compelled me to begin again
these half-hearted rendezvous
                    that bring such pain?

751

Though several days
have yet to pass
since we saw each other,
how intensely I long for her,
driving madness upon madness!

752

What can I do
when she bears on my mind like this,
mere visions of her obsessing me?
What can I do
inside the thicket of men's eyes?

753

I thought that, after we had met,
my desire would be assuaged a while,
but now my longing rages all the more.

Along with the gathering of individual lyrical moments into strands of expression, another important development in the “Personal Exchanges” is that of the psychological metaphor. The oldest literary devices in Japanese are the epithetical formulas known (in terminology invented during the Heian Period) as “pillow words” (makurakotoba) and “preludes” (joshi). These were originally formulaically bound descriptions, used especially in introducing place names (“heavenly Kagu Hill,” “Nara, beautiful in blue earth,” etc.). They seem to have expressed a collective sense of the essential quality of a place. In the “Personal Exchanges” we see, emerging from this archaic form, a new, specifically metaphorical use of introductory expressions. One of the early examples occurs in an exchange between Emperor Tenji and Princess Kagami, in which the Princess writes:

Like the hidden stream
trickling beneath the trees
down the autumn mountainside,
so does my love increase
more than yours, my Lord.

(II.92)

Here nature provides an image of passion as an incremental force, an action of the emotions that, imperceptible at first, gathers in time. It is far more than a merely ornamental “prelude,” for it brings off a dynamic interplay between nature and the psyche in a way similar to that of the Homeric simile. Again and again in The Ten Thousand Leaves, longing is the occasion for the birth of striking metaphorical images:

Is it because my thoughts of her
follow one upon another—
like the bridge of planks
across the shallows of Mano Cove—
that I see my wife in my dreams?

(IV.490)

Is it for the rising of desire—
          like the tide come spilling
          up from the reedy shore—
that I cannot forget you?

(IV.617)

The astonishing ease with which the phenomena of nature are transformed into symbolic images of psychological states is one of the great accomplishments of Japanese literature. We can see its beginnings in the poetry of longing.

Book Five is unique in The Ten Thousand Leaves. First, it is a journal of the poetry circle which formed around Ōtomo Tabito at the Dazaifu military headquarters, and includes letters and essays as well as poems. And it is a record of Japanese poetry at a time when its composers were engaged in an enthusiastic acquisition of Chinese literary culture. The beginning of the eighth century saw the resumption of intercourse with the continent on a large scale. It was an age when the leader of a Japanese embassy to T'ang China, upon his return to Nara, appeared at Court to make his report in full Chinese dress. Book Five is full of letters written in Chinese in which one Japanese poet inquires of the other's well-being with allusions to Han Dynasty legends, or phrases his hope to meet the other soon with a gorgeous Chinese cliché such as “I await the time when a parting of the clouds may reveal to me your illustrious visage.”

But, to the fortune of native literature, the poets of this age were not content merely to copy the Chinese, but applied their learning to compositions in their own language as well. Thus the above cliché is followed by a poem which weds the Chinese image of the “dragon steed” to the nostalgic desire of a Nara courtier to return to his capital, complete with its “pillow word.”

Would I could obtain
a dragon steed right now,
so I could fly
          to the capital at Nara,
          beautiful in blue earth.

(V.806)

Ōtomo Tabito, the author of this tanka and the Chinese letter which precedes it, was the son of a chancellor and the scion of a once-great family that had begun its long decline. In the year 728, at the age of sixty-four, Tabito became Commander of the Dazaifu in Kyushu (at that time the island was known as Tsukushi). The Dazaifu had been established in the late seventh century as a “defense headquarters” near the Tsushima Straits, between Japan and Korea, at a time of expanding Chinese power in the Korean peninsula. By the eighth century the Dazaifu had become the imperial office overseeing the administration of southern Japan. Tabito remained there for three years until he was recalled to Nara and himself made Chancellor.

In 726 an official by the name of Yamanoue Okura, five years older than Tabito but of far lesser rank, had been appointed Governor of Chikuzen, a province within the Dazaifu jurisdiction. Okura is thought to have been by birth a Korean, whose family had emigrated to Japan during his childhood. He was a member of the embassy sent to China in 702, and seems to have spent at least two to three years studying on the continent. A poem by Okura appears among the “Thirty-two poems on the plum blossoms” (V.815-846) composed at a banquet held by Tabito at his Dazaifu residence in 730, and it is clear that Okura was the most talented member of Tabito's circle.

It is often said of these two enthusiasts of Chinese literature that Tabito was the Taoist, preferring the freedom of commune with nature, while Okura was the Confucianist, intent on his social and family responsibilities. The difference, however, does not seem to be a clear-cut philosophical one so much as a difference in personality. Book Three has a “Poem by Yamanoue Okura, upon leaving a banquet”:

Okura shall take his leave now.
My child must be crying
and its mother,
who bears it on her back,
must be waiting for me.

(III.337)

This is immediately followed by “Thirteen poems in praise of wine by Lord Otomo Tabito,” among them what seems to be a response to Okura's self-righteous proclamation:

Rather than making pronouncements
          with an air of wisdom,
it's better to down the wine
and sob drunken tears.

(III.341)

There is definitely a dour side to Okura, most of whose remaining work was written while he was in his middle to late sixties. Tabito, though nearly as old, is never as obsessed with age and illness as is Okura. Tabito is comfortable in the “Personal Exchanges”; he is at his best in the world of the literary banquet, leading his guests in elegant conceits, exchanging cups of wine, and watching as “the plum blossoms opened like a spray of powder before a dressing mirror, and the orchids gave off a fragrance as from a purse of perfume.” Only Okura could write a work like “An essay lamenting his own illness,” a tour de force of disease and death, written in a Chinese that ranges over hundreds of lines from the heights of eloquence to the depths of pedantry and back again.

Yet it is his very seriousness, his rude withdrawal from Tabito's banquet of aestheticism, that, along with his profound apprenticeship in the Chinese and Buddhist classics, makes Okura the greatest poet between Hitomaro and Yakamochi. His “Poem sorrowing on the impermanence of life in this world” (V.804), his “Dialog of the Destitute” (V.892), his lament on the death of his son (V.904) are unique in Japanese poetry for their stark and relentless treatment of themes which are anything but elegant. In “An essay lamenting his own long illness” Okura speaks of a dead man being less than a living rat, then exclaims at the end of the essay, with the half-hearted remorse of a poet who has scandalized his audience, “How shameful of me to use a rat as an example!” Okura's work includes rats; it includes the empty rice pots of the poor; it does not shirk from describing the devastating effect of a fatal illness on his own child. Okura's is a humanistic lyricism that does not flow directly from what Hitomaro has created. Indeed, perhaps nothing testifies to the breadth of The Ten Thousand Leaves so much as the fact that it contains the work of both Hitomaro and Okura.

What we know today as The Ten Thousand Leaves probably did not take its present form until sometime after 759, when Yakamochi wrote his last recorded poem. The initial process of compilation, in which Yakamochi participated, certainly went on into the last decades of the eighth century, and perhaps well beyond Yakamochi's death (ca. 785) and into the ninth. The first half of the ninth century saw composition in Chinese rise to its greatest prestige, and interest in native verse suffered as a result. But The Ten Thousand Leaves is mentioned in the Kokinshū of 905, the first of the “imperial anthologies,” which marks the reemergence of poetry in Japanese. In the preface to the Kokinshū its compiler, Ki no Tsurayuki, praises Hitomaro as the “saint of poetry” (uta no hijiri). But the first mention of The Ten Thousand Leaves “in twenty books” does not occur until 1086 (in the preface to the Goshūishū anthology). Clearly, we do not know what changes the poems and the original notes which follow them have undergone in the intervening centuries.

We do know that by the tenth century, with the invention of the native hiragana syllabary, The Ten Thousand Leaves had become unreadable. In 951 Emperor Murakami ordered a poet named Minamoto Shitagō to decipher its phopetic and semantic mix of Chinese characters. It was the beginning of a process that has occupied thousands of scholars through the centuries since. The most important of these scholars were the Priest Keichū in the seventeenth century and Kamo Mabuchi in the eighteenth. Their voluminous textual commentaries are the basis for the modern readings and interpretations of the anthology.

The process continues to this day. The most important work of twentieth-century scholarship, revolutionizing many of the old interpretations, has been Omodaka Hisataka's Man'yōshū Chūshaku (“An Annotation of The Ten Thousand Leaves”) in twenty volumes (published by Chuōkōron Sha from 1957 to 1968). Among all the available modern texts, my reading of the anthology has benefitted most from Omodaka's work and from the new modern translation and commentary by Nakanishi Susumu, Man'yōshū (The Ten Thousand Leaves), the first volume of which appeared from Kōdansha in 1978.

Professor Nakanishi has been extremely generous with his time and advice, and kindly made available to me the galley proofs of his commentary before they were published. I am also grateful to Professor Earl Miner for his encouragement of this project and his reading of the manuscript, and to Miriam Brokaw of Princeton University Press for her continued interest and support. As a translator and a student of literature, I am indebted to John Nathan for years of inspiration.

This volume of the translation, incorporating Books One to Five, was begun while I was a dissertation fellow of the Japan Foundation. The Foundation has also provided support for the next volume (Books Six to Ten), and I wish to record my gratitude for its generous assistance.

Finally, I wish to express my thanks to Mrs. Tamura Kiyono of the Hiyoshi Kan in Nara, in whose venerable rooms much of this volume was first written, and to Ishibashi Sadao, my companion in the autumn of 1971 on the first of many trips to Nara and Asuka.

On an autumn night in the sprawling grounds of the Tōdaiji temple in Nara the only sound is the high-pitched cry of the deer, wandering among the monuments to which The Ten Thousand Leaves is so oblivious. The poets of Nara turned their attention to the deer's cry itself. They perceived longing in the eerie sound. Uta, the Japanese word for “song” or “poem,” is originally uttae, an “appeal.”

The cry stretches, and breaks, and then all that remain from the world of The Ten Thousand Leaves are its looming hills and silent fields.