Organizer and Chair: Jason P. Webb, Tokyo University, Japan

Discussant: Mack Horton, University of California, Berkeley

The Man’yôshû anthology is the poetic behemoth of premodern Japan, containing over 4,500 works of poetry and prose composed during the three hundred or so years prior to its completion in the mid-eighth century. And as if its sheer volume were not enough, the bulk of Man’yôshû works are transcribed (in earliest manuscripts) in the rather opaque medium of man’yôgana—only adding to the anthology’s aura of inaccessibility. As such—in the world of English-language scholarship—Man’yôshû research has lagged behind that of the better-known premodern texts such as Genji. This panel gathers together scholars of a diversity of approaches who share the conviction that the richness of the Man’yôshû has not been given its due. Commons proposes to trace lore about the premier Man’yôshû poet, Hitomaro, by explaining its tendency to fixate, over the centuries, upon his various putative gravesites. How do variant narratives of Hitomaro’s death, continuing to the mid-Edo period, relate to his status as a poetic divinity? Robinson shifts discussion from the latter-day reception of Man’yôshû to a view of the anthology as an act of literary historiography unto itself. He argues that the creation of an anthology constitutes a literary intervention, and as such invariably is imbued by the biases of the anthologist(s). Webb seeks to compare Japanese- and Chinese-language poetry generated in the context of royal progresses to Yoshino, and in doing so move beyond the common misconception that the literary tradition of Japan is monolingual. Senior scholar Mack Horton will serve as discussant.

Anne Commons, University of Alberta, Canada

The death of the poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro has been an important part of his legend since his first textual appearance in the eighth-century Man’yôshû. However, accounts of the circumstances and sites of his death and possible burial have varied considerably over time. While the Man’yôshû depicts Hitomaro’s death as taking place in an isolated spot in the wilderness of Iwami, later texts describe visits by poets to recognised Hitomaro gravesites in Harima, Yamato, and elsewhere. Viewed within the larger context of Hitomaro’s reception, particularly his canonization as a deity of Japanese poetry, these literary constructions of his death and gravesite can be understood both as products of their own particular times and places and as stages in Hitomaro’s evolution from poet to poetic divinity. This paper will examine changing literary representations of Hitomaro’s death and grave from the Man’yôshû to the mid-Edo period, against the background of Hitomaro’s deification and increasing importance to poets as an ancestral figure and guardian of the Way of Japanese Poetry. It will discuss locations identified as Hitomaro’s final resting place, but will also argue that Hitomaro’s grave came to transcend considerations of geographical location to become a site defined and constructed through texts. With this in mind, the significance of gravesite pilgrimages by poets will be analysed in relation to other practices associated with Hitomaro’s worship, including portraiture, ritual and enshrinement.

Jeremy Robinson, University of Michigan

While the Man’yôshû offers a glimpse of the formative processes through which ritual and oral folk song was transformed into a polished literary form, we must not forget that its compilation was not merely a neutral re-transcription of existing poetry from previous centuries, but an anthologization of poetry as viewed through the lens of eighth-century poetic practice. As such, it was transcribed, annotated, and organized according to poetic principles defined in part by the anthologists themselves (and tacitly assumed by later readers), but which may well have been foreign to the poets themselves. This paper will examine the evidence within the Man’yôshû of the mediating hand of the anthologist, whether in adding titles and notes to individual poems, in placing poems within generic classifications, or in "standardizing" irregular poems; and explore the impact of that mediation on later interpretation. It also will examine the often conflicting conventions employed by the anthologists in their effort to create a defining framework for Japanese verse in the context of both the Chinese poetic tradition and earlier, no longer extant Japanese poetry collections. Last, it will question the extent to which we can meaningfully recreate an originally oral native poetic tradition based on a written work that claims to represent it. The ultimate goal of this examination is to better understand the importance of the act of anthologization itself to the early creation of poetic conventions and standards.

Jason P. Webb, University of Tokyo, Japan

Japanese historians have long puzzled over what motivated the sovereign Jitô (r. 686-697) to undertake no less than thirty-one royal progresses to Yoshino. Movement of the sovereign through space on the periphery of the capital was, to be sure, consonant with efforts to reconfirm the loyalties of regional chieftains (through the ritual exchange of tribute and largesse), assert the sovereign’s spiritual potency (by the royal performance of rites meant to persuade the gods of rain and wind to allow a bountiful harvest), and enact the persona of sovereign-as-benefactor (by conferring special pardons upon convicts, and rewards to local notables). But still, in Jitô’s case: why Yoshino, and why so often? The key to these questions, this paper will argue, can be found in the body of poetry generated by literati who attended (and, in a sense, narrated) the sovereign’s visits to her preferred site. Participants on the whole were "biliterate"—meaning that poems praising Yoshino, Jitô, and the splendors of the current reign were cast in both "Japanese" and "Chinese" idioms. Here uta and shi worked in concert to envelop the Yoshino—like its famous mists—in layer upon layer of mythological significance. Attending to where these idioms overlap—and where they differ sharply, even as they contribute to the same purpose—forces us to reconsider these Man’yôshû and Kaifûsô poems in light of their particular ritual function of celebrating royal authority, and, in broader terms, as interrelated products of the complex linguistic universe of seventh- and eighth-century Japan.