The Role of Poetry in Narrative Prose During the Heian Period

Nearly a thousand years ago, the country we now know as Japan was in the early stages of development. During that time China was considered the “center of the world,” therefore many other countries, including Japan, envied China’s power and wanted to borrow elements of their culture to become more like China. One of the many things that Japan “borrowed” from China was the high art of poetry. In this paper I will discuss elements in two major Japanese works of poetry: Man’yōshū and Kokinshū. By examining literary components of both anthologies I plan to make educated inferences about the roles they played in the time period they were compiled.

Man’yōshū is thought to be compiled by Otomo no Ya, an accomplished poet who also wrote four of the twenty books of Man’yōshū. There is some controversy that Otomo was not the only compiler, but it is generally agreed that he is at least a main compiler. Although Man’yōshū is dated to been completed in the late 700’s, some of the poems are dated as early at the 5th century. Consisting of 4,516 poems, Man’yōshū displayed a variety of poetic forms (different syllable counts), topics, and authors from varying backgrounds, as well as some rather explicit political views, but unlike Kokinshū, Man’yōshū has no known available preface or evidence of whether or not it was an imperial anthology (Handout 2). Topics were organized into three different categories: zōka (Miscellaneous), sōmon (love), and banka (death) (Handout 2). During the time Man’yōshū was complied, Japan was greatly influenced by mainland Asian countries so Man’yōshū played a role in showing the other countries that Japan was creating progress in the literary field even if poetry is not originally a Japanese form of writing. The ...

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...ries such as “big brother” China, the originator of poetry. Kokinshū was written almost completely in Japanese and the preface laid out the standard for waka, Japanese poetry. Japan was beginning to stray away from the ideas of mainland Asia and proving their own abilities even if those ideas are initially based off of other countries. The influence made by other countries will never disappear in Japanese culture and some may say that the Japanese are basically Chinese on a separate island, but the Japanese have embodied such ideas and made it their own.

Works Cited

"Chapter 4-5." UH Manoa History 151 . University of Hawaii Manoa, n.d. Web. 30 May 2011. .

Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese literature, from the earliest era to the mid-nineteenth century. Grove Pr, 1955. Print.

EALL 271 Handouts 2, 3, & 4