The story
The Man'yoshu is the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry, in twenty volumes with about 4,500 poems, mostly short tanka but also longer choka. It was assembled in the eighth century at the Nara court, and its last dated poem is from 759. The poems range from the mid-seventh century to that date. The compiler is uncertain, though Otomo no Yakamochi, himself a leading poet in the book, is usually thought to have shaped the final form.
Writing Japanese was a problem for the poets of this period, since the country had adopted Chinese characters but not a native script. The Man'yoshu solved it by using characters for their sounds (a system called man'yogana), a step on the way to the kana syllabaries. Its poets include court figures such as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro and Yamanoue no Okura, as well as border guards, unnamed rural people and women such as Princess Nukata. Its themes are love, grief, travel and nature, and it includes poems in dialects of eastern Japan and songs of conscripted frontier guards. Later poets treated its direct feeling as a model. In 2019 the era name Reiwa was taken from a line of the Man'yoshu, the first time an era name came from Japanese rather than Chinese literature.
Why it mattered
- It fixed the waka tradition and preserved the earliest body of Japanese verse.
- Its phonetic use of Chinese characters led to the later kana scripts, which made Heian literature such as the Tale of Genji possible.
- The anthology gave later court poets, including those of the Kokinshu, a classic standard to draw on.
- It records the voices of commoners alongside the aristocracy, rare for the period.
Sources
- Manyo shu Britannica
- A New Era for Japan: Showa to Heisei to the Future Nippon.com
Community notes
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