Man'yoshu
composition: secureauthorship: traditional
Four and a half thousand poems gather emperors, courtiers, frontier guards and unnamed provincials into one collection, in a Japanese written phonetically with Chinese characters before any native script existed.
- a court anthology that admits provincial and non-aristocratic voices
- Chinese characters used purely phonetically, the ancestor of kana
- emotional directness later court taste would smooth away
- the largest surviving body of early Japanese language
The anthology's twenty books range from formal court verse to soldiers' partings and love poems attributed to ordinary people, with a directness later court poetry would refine away. Its script, using Chinese characters purely for sound, is called man'yogana after it and is the ancestor of both later Japanese syllabaries. Because the compilation includes voices from outside the capital and outside the aristocracy, it is the broadest social record in early Japanese literature.
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