SOURCE: “A Brief Note on the Manyoshu,” in Westerly, Vol. 23, No. 3, October, 1978, pp. 57-59.

In the following essay, Wilson offers a brief overview of the Manyoshu, with remarks on the wide diversity of both the poets who contributed their works and the forms in which they chose to express themselves.

The Manyoshu (The Myriad Leaves Collection), which Otomo no Yakamochi seems to have ceased compiling in 759, is the earliest surviving Japanese anthology of poems in Japanese. Its twenty books and 4516 poems do in fact include, either in whole or in part, older but lost anthologies of poetry in Japanese; while an earlier anthology of poems in Chinese by Japanese poets, the Kaifuso (Fond Recollections of Poetry) of 751, survives in its entirety. Curiously enough, the Manyoshu itself (though rightly regarded by the Japanese as the quintessence of Japanese-ness in poetry) nevertheless contains a few, a very few, poems in...