SOURCE: A preface to Land of the Reed Plains: Ancient Japanese Lyrics from the “Manyoshu,” Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1972, pp. 7-14.

In the following excerpt, Yasuda offers an overview of the Manyoshu and explains what sets it apart from other Japanese poetry anthologies.

The Manyoshu is the oldest, largest, and greatest anthology of Japanese poetry, one which ranks, especially in the pure quality of its lyricism, among the masterpieces of world literature. Its title has been variously translated as Collection of Myriad Leaves or, probably with more accuracy, Collection for Ten Thousand Ages. It contains over four thousand poems of varying length, arranged in twenty volumes. The precise date of its compilation is not known; probably the collection reached its present form sometime late in the eighth century after having been begun some fifty years earlier and added to from time to time. Thus it coincides in time...