Man'yōshū
Oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Man'yōshū (万葉集, pronounced [maɰ̃joꜜːɕɯː]; literally "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves")[lower-alpha 1][1] is the oldest extant collection of Japanese waka (poetry in Classical Japanese),[lower-alpha 2] compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in a series of compilers, is today widely believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi, although numerous other theories have been proposed. The chronologically last datable poem in the collection is from AD 759 (No. 4516).[2] It contains many poems from a much earlier period, with the bulk of the collection representing the period between AD 600 and 759.[3] The precise significance of the title is not known with certainty.
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The Man'yōshū comprises more than 4,500 waka poems in 20 volumes, and is broadly divided into three genres: Zoka, songs at banquets and trips; Somonka, songs about love between men and women; and Banka, songs to mourn the death of people.[4] These songs were written by people of various statuses, such as the Emperor, aristocrats, junior officials, Sakimori soldiers (Sakimori songs), street performers, peasants, and Togoku folk songs (Eastern songs). There are more than 2,100 waka poems by unknown authors.[5][6]
The collection is divided into 20 parts or books; this number was followed in most later collections. The collection contains 265 chōka (long poems), 4,207 tanka (short poems), one an-renga (short connecting poem), one bussokusekika (a poem in the form 5-7-5-7-7-7; named for the poems inscribed on the Buddha's footprints at Yakushi-ji in Nara), four kanshi (Chinese poems), and 22 Chinese prose passages. Unlike later collections, such as the Kokin Wakashū, there is no preface.
The Man'yōshū is widely regarded as being a particularly unique Japanese work, though its poems and passages did not differ starkly from its contemporaneous (for Yakamochi's time) scholarly standard of Chinese literature and poetics; many entries of the Man'yōshū have a continental tone, earlier poems having Confucian or Taoist themes and later poems reflecting on Buddhist teachings. However, the Man'yōshū is considered 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 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.[7]
The compilation of the Man'yōshū also preserves the names of earlier Japanese poetic compilations, these being the Ruijū Karin (類聚歌林, Forest of Classified Verses), several texts called the Kokashū (古歌集, Collections of Antique Poems), as well as at least four family or individual anthologies known as kashū (家集) belonging to Kakimoto no Hitomaro, Kasa no Kanamura, Takahashi no Mushimaro and Tanabe no Sakimaro.[8]