AS 201 The Manyōshū

The Manyōshū, consisting of works created from 625-750s.

It was compiled c. 758

It consists of 4,516 poems, the most of any Poetic Anthology.

The poems vary in length and styles, though 4,200 are in the tanka (short verse) or the 31 syllable form (5-7-5-7-7), also known as waka or "Japanese verse"

MYS poems feature "a simple clarity, a pure lyrical impulse" and can be seen as the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan. (See Ian Hideo Levy, The Ten Thousand Leaves, Princeton, 1981). Says Levy:

The Manyōshū is a chorus of lyrical voices born out of a tradition of ritual verbal art that stretches back into Japan's preliterate centuries, back into myth itself.

 

Another critic observes,

...I think we can say that the poems of the Manyōshū represent the sparks thrown off by the combustion of the human spirit in early times. The men and women who produced these poems probably had very little consciousness of literary genres and, in most cases, did not give any deep thought to what sort of social function their works might fulfill. They simply found themselves with a kind of rush of feeling that demanded expression. They were possessed by something that welled up from deep within them.Therefore, their works, although they may at times be rather naive and artless in expression, have a sense of realness and urgency about them--they are fashioned out of actual flesh and bone. (Ikeda Daisaku)

Poems, or uta in Japanese, are both public and private, personal utterances. The age of the MYS was the age of the establishment of the Japanese monarchy, so many of the early poems were public in nature, what Levy calls a "patterned, ritual evocation of the sacredness of the Yamato land," something it was incumbent on the monarch, who was also the high priest of Shinto, to ennuciate and proclaim.

 

SEE the PDF "Manyoshu.pdf" on WISE for a few selected poems

 

One of the better known "Manyō" poets is Kakinomoto-no-Hitomaro. Although not much is known about him, he wrote the following when Emperor Temmu ascended the throne after defeating his rivals in a brief conflict knows as the Jinshin War:

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 capital city.

 

But he also composed more personal poems of longing like:

In the autumn mountains

The colored leaves are falling

If I could hold them back,

I could still see her.

And

This morning I will not

Comb my hair.

It has lain

Pillowed in the hands of my lover.

 

The colored leaves

Have hidden the paths

Of the autumn mountain.

How can I find my girl,

Wandering on ways I do not know?

 

Or, when ending a long poem (choka) on the death of his wife, he writes,

I struggled up here,

kicking the rocks part,

but it did no good;

my wife, whom I thought

was of this world,

is ash.

 The great Manyō poet Princess Nukada (aka, Nukata, c. 630-690 CE) wrote, when asked to choose between the brilliance of 10,000 blossoms in Spring v. the beautiful but poignant Fall colors in the thousands of leaves that dot the autumn hillsides, this poem:

When spring comes,

bursting winter's bonds,

birds that were still

come out crying

and flowers that lay unopening

split into blossoms.

But, the hillsides being overgrown,

I may go among the foliage

yet cannopt pick those flowers.

The grass being rank, I may pick

yet cannot examone them.

 

Looking at the leaves of the trees

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.

 

A classic statement about how even though Spring is so beautiful and full of life, color, and energy, there is something about Autumn that fits remarkably well with the Japanese sensibility. Japanese retain a special place for reminders that all thinge must pass away eventually, and they ap[preciate things that bring to mind teh emotions of regret, longing, and sadness. There is a beauty in this sadness, in this melancholy, and it arises from the recognition of the transient nature of all life.

***

It is standard to regard the Manyōshū as a particularly Japanese work. This does not mean that the poems and passages of the collection differed starkly from the scholarly standard (in Yakamochi's time) of Chinese literature and poetics. Certainly many entries of the Manyōshū have a continental tone, earlier poems having Confucian or Daoist themes and later poems reflecting on Buddhist teachings. Yet, the Manyōshū is singular, even in comparison with later works, in choosing primarily Ancient Japanese themes, extolling Shintō virtues of forthrightness (真 makoto?) and virility (masuraoburi). In addition, the language of many entries of the Man'yōshū exerts a powerful sentimental appeal to readers:

[T]his early collection has something of the freshness of dawn. [...] There are irregularities not tolerated later, such as hypometric lines; there are evocative place names and [pillow words (枕詞 makurakotoba?)]; and there are evocative exclamations such as kamo, whose appeal is genuine even if incommunicable. In other words, the collection contains the appeal of an art at its pristine source with a romantic sense of venerable age and therefore of an ideal order since lost.[3]

from: https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Man_y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB.html

 

Toward the Kokinshū (1,111 selected polems, all waka)

So, the scene is set even in the MYS for Japanese poetry to come full-circle, from a fresh, naive, ritual expression, to a specifically aesthetic vision outside the boundaries of ritual. (Levy) A century and a half after the appearence of the MYS, in the early 900s, much had changed both politically and linguistically in Japan; the poetic sensibility had evolved to be more self-conscious, more refined and more complex in its subjectiveness.

In other words, poetic truth as it comes to be expressed in the Kokinshū (905)--the next major poetic anthology--is not so much something that is "out there" that poets proclaim in public, but more a construct of the poet's imagination, of his or her thoughts and emotions, what the poet him or herself articulates the truth to be.

So, in this sense, it is a fairly "modern" style of poetic sensibility, sometimes referred to as the affective-expressive mode. That is, we exist in the world, we encoutner things through our senses, and we are affected by them; they may penetrate deeply into our inner beings, our souls, and this evokes a response in us. We try to capture this response and express it in our art be it paining, music, or literature.

At the least, it is something with which we moderns can feel fairly comfortable.

Kokin Wakashu is an anthology of 1,111 Japanese poems (in the most widely circulated editions) compiled and edited early in the 10th century. The title, conventionally abridged in Japanese to Kokinshu, may be translated "Collection of Old and New Japanese Poems" or, perhaps more precisely, "...Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems." The collection begins with a Preface in Japanese and, in some editions, concludes with one in Chinese. The Japanese Preface, opening with the famous words "Japanese poetry takes as its seed the human heart," was long regarded as a model of classical prose, and line for line is undoubtedly the most heavily commented secular prose text of the Japanese tradition. The poems are divided into twenty scrolls or books (maki) each of which bears a title referring to conventional poetic topics (the seasons, love, parting, mourning, miscellaneous or "mixed" topics, etc.) or to genres ("acrostic" poems, "mixed" or miscellaneous forms, and poems of the "Bureau of Song"). The great majority of poems in the collection (all but 9, in fact) are in the form today usually called tanka (literally "short poem or song") but traditionally referred to as waka ("Japanese song / poem") or simply as uta ("song, poem") because this was the predominant canonical form of Japanese poetry from perhaps the 8th century until the late 19th century.

 

Poet/Lover: Ariwara no Narihira 在原業平 (825-880)

つひにゆく

道とはかねて

聞きしかど

昨日今日とは

思はざりしを

Tsui ni yuku

Michi to wa kanete

Kikishikado

Kono kyoo to wa

Omowazarishi o.

 

         Along a somewhat different axis, scholars and critics of recent years have debated whether this interrogative mood reflects the ironic affirmation of a recently acquired technical facility of poetic expression, or rather a sense of nostalgic resignation, even of despair, inspired perhaps by the dissemination of Buddhist doctrine, or by the increasing political hegemony of the Fujiwara clan, or by some combination thereof. It is up to the reader to decide, of course, but while individual poems do show a fairly wide range of tonal variation, few, especially those of the seasonal and love books (which combined make up more than two thirds of the collection) are completely free of irony, and only a rather small minority of Kokinshu poems can be counted as unqualifiedly celebratory or "pastoral" in an affirmative sense.

http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/kokinshu/intro.html