SOURCE: “The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry,” in Southern Review, Vol. XIII, No. 2, July, 1980, pp. 97-98.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses Chinese influences on Japanese poetry.

The Kokinwaka-shu (Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems), the first of 21 such Imperial Anthologies, was compiled at the order of the 60th Japanese Emperor, the Emperor Daigo, in 905. Its 1, 111 poems, arranged in 20 books and a small supplement, are almost all tanka (an unrhymed poem in 31 syllables organized in five units of 5:7:5:7:7 syllables), and only five poems in the whole Anthology are in longer form.

Somewhat surprisingly, the first importance of this anthology of Japanese poetry is that all its poems are in Japanese; a vocabulary of some 2,000 words, none of Chinese origin, which became the basic resource of all subsequent tanka. The point is that for a period of about a century after the compilation of the first (and...