Man’yōshū vs. Kokinshū

Man’yoshu and Kokinshuu are some of the earliest anthologies of Japanese poetry to be considered literary canons. The Man’yoshu dates back to the 8th century and contains 4,516 poems. Man’yoshu, which is translated as “Collection of Ten Thousands Leafs”, was compiled from a wide range of Japan society, where many of the authors remained anonymous. The Kokinshuu appears later in Japan’s history and is an anthology from 905 AD that contains a total of 1,111 poems. The compilers for the Kokinshuu are Ki no Tsurayuki, Ki no Tomonori, Oshikochi no Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine. Ki no Tsurayuki was the compiler who wrote the preface of the Kokinshuu, which predicted the canonization of the Kokinshuu for Japanese poetry. Man’yoshu and Kokinshuu were compiled in the Heian Era, which was relatively calm period in Japanese history, however it was period where the society had not gained a full literary tradition to call its own. The significance of Man’yoshu and Kokinshuu in Japanese literature is that their poetic devices were to become the canon for hundreds of years from that point in history and would become more enduring than the emperors, who demanded their compiling.

Before the development of hiragana and katakana, the Japanese poets used Chinese kanji during the Heian Period from which the Man’yoshu was recorded in. Furthermore, they were also written with a writing language known as man’yogana, which is assumed to be an intermediate language between Chinese and the creation of hiragana Japanese. Previous literary examples from this era are the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. However, Man’yoshu did not want to remain true to the Chinese directionless prose of poetry style. One of the main roles of Man’yoshu was to develop liter...

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...kotoba or kokoro. These qualities mentioned in the Kana Preface by Ki no Tsurayuki is a top down decision of political shaping of Japan as well as his personal aesthetic preferences that he though Chinese poetry was lacking. However when a society decides on literary canons, they are making literary traditions they are able to identify with. The roles and significance of the canon, which comes from the top down decision making of nobles, still depends on works of merit that survive the tribulations that may face it in the future.

Works Cited

Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese Literature, from the Earliest Era to the Mid-nineteenth Century. New York: Grove, 1955. Print.

McCullough, Helen Craig., and Tsurayuki Ki. Kokin Wakashū: the First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry : with Tosa Nikki and Shinsen Waka. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ., 1985. Print.