Erotic poetry in the Man’yoshu is the body of poems on love, the body, and sex collected in the Man’yoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves; twenty books, some 4,500 poems), Japan’s oldest extant poetry anthology, compiled in the mid-eighth century. Covering roughly 130 years of poems up to 759, the collection turns on three great divisions, the somon (exchange), banka (elegy), and zoka (miscellaneous), of which the somon form an independent body of love poems centred on exchange between men and women. This article surveys the structure of sexual expression across a class range from aristocrat to commoner, the styles of major women poets, the commoner desire of the frontier-guard and eastern songs, the technique of sexual suggestion through pillow-words and pivot-words, and the influence on later poetry and court romance, drawing on modern scholarship in ancient literature.

Overview

The Man’yoshu was compiled in stages with the involvement of Otomo no Yakamochi, written in man’yogana that use Chinese characters phonetically and semantically. Its poems span an extremely wide range of strata: emperors, princes, aristocrats, officials, court ladies, wandering women, frontier guards, eastern farmers, and beggar-singers. This is in striking contrast to the Heian imperial anthologies, which are almost confined to aristocratic work, and is the ground of the collection’s rare value as a record that lets one observe early-Japanese sexual expression across classes.

Modern scholarship has read the somon as a multi-layered development from court-ritual song to private love poem and on to transmitted folk-song exchange, and has shown, through comparison with the yuefu and palace-style verse of the Six Dynasties, that Man’yo sexual expression is not reducible to a simple “masculine” naturalness but is a highly literary construction shaped by the reception of Chinese letters.

The divisions and the somon

The Man’yoshu turns on the three divisions of zoka (poems of public occasions such as court ritual, progresses, and banquets), banka (elegies for the dead), and somon (exchanges among lovers, kin, and friends), the great part of the last being love exchange between men and women. The somon concentrate especially in books 4, 8, and 11-14; books 11 and 12 collect a great body of anonymous, transmitted love poems forming an older stratum distinct from the private somon of the aristocracy.

“Somon” originally denoted, in Chinese letters, the exchange of letters in general; in its Japanese reception it converged on love exchange. Man’yo somon was not merely the literarisation of private correspondence but a self-standing poetic genre, a point of distinctly Japanese development. Within the elegies, poems mourning a spouse or lover bind sex and death inseparably: Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s elegies for his wife make the living sexual relationship itself the object of lyric through the longing for her body, voice, and remembered face, a structure of “sex revived through death” that became an important mode of later poetry and tale.

Major women poets

Princess Nukata, a court poet said to have been loved by both Emperors Tenji and Tenmu, left poems read since antiquity as implying a triangular relationship between the two sovereigns: her poem on the purple field where the field-guard might see her lover waving his sleeve, and Tenmu’s reply that he could not so love a woman who is another’s wife if he hated her. Her active avowal of love from the woman’s side, and the exchange with a male sovereign, mark the earliest peak of women’s sexual expression in the ancient period.

Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume, aunt of Yakamochi, left the most poems of any woman in the collection, eighty-four. Her work demands that even at reunion the lover exhaust the words of his vow, an active avowal of love, and her body of poems mixes a maternal gaze toward younger men, love poems composed on behalf of young couples, and the poems of her shamanic role in ritual, showing the breadth of ancient women’s sexual expression.

Sano no Chigami no Otome is known for the exchange of sixty-three poems with Nakatomi no Yakamori when her husband was exiled to Echizen. Her poem wishing for a heavenly fire to fold up and burn away the long road of his exile is among the most intense expressions of passion in ancient women’s love poetry, an example of how women’s sexual expression reached its sharpest poetic heights within the tension between ritual and private feeling.

Frontier-guard songs and commoner sex

The frontier-guard songs (sakimori-uta), by eastern men conscripted at Naniwa in 755 and their families, concentrate in books 14 and 20. Collected by Yakamochi during his role in conscription, the poems exchanged between departing husband and remaining wife carry a directness of sexual feeling that bypasses the rhetoric of aristocratic letters. One poem has the departing husband see his wife’s face reflected in the water he drinks; others have the wife vow not to loosen her sash, that is, to break off sexual relations, in his absence, a frank reference to bodily acts not found in aristocratic somon.

The eastern songs (azuma-uta), a folk-song body of the eastern provinces in book 14, frequently use eastern dialect and refer directly to body parts and sexual acts avoided in aristocratic poetry. Poems in which labour and love merge in daily life are precious records of how commoner sexual expression existed, an “undivided state of life and song” that scholars place as the source of a counter-value to aristocratic letters. The poems of wandering women (ukareme) also appear, foreshadowing the later literature of dancing-girls and courtesans.

Rhetorical technique and sexual suggestion

The pillow-word (makura-kotoba), a fixed epithet placed before a particular word, often functioned in love poems as a device to indicate sexual matters obliquely; epithets bearing on jewels, night, and life evoked the female body, the night tryst, and sexual union as indirect signs. Pivot-words (kakekotoba) on homophones (such as “meet” and “Osaka,” “sleep” and “peak,” “pine” and “wait”) doubled sexual implication behind a surface of natural description, and the long introductory phrases (jokotoba) linked natural images to the core of love-feeling while avoiding direct sexual statement.

Most of the sexual vocabulary inherited by later Heian poetry, “night,” “robe,” “pillow,” “dream,” “sleeve,” “cord,” “sash,” “under-sash,” already appears in the Man’yoshu with clear implication. The phrase “to loosen the under-sash,” indicating sexual union through the act of untying the inner cord of the robe, became established as a set expression and recurs in the transmitted somon of books 11 and 12, forming the base layer of Heian poetry and tale.

Class structure and cultural function

The breadth of the Man’yoshu’s authorship records the class differences of early-Japanese sexual expression with rare precision. The poems of aristocrats and court poets bear Chinese-influenced rhetoric and ritual gesture; those of commoners and provincial folk foreground labour, the body, and direct acts. The two do not simply oppose but cross, and the inclusion of eastern and frontier-guard songs in a central anthology, through aristocratic selection and editing, established a cultural circuit between them.

Ancient poetry was originally not literature to be read but a collective act voiced at banquets, rituals, and labour. Love poems too were not closed as private letters but performed in company, drawing out the sympathy and reply of an audience as part of a social act. Recent scholarship stresses this character of the Man’yoshu as a “literature of the occasion” and notes the limits of reading love poems as mere private confession.

Cultural-historical significance and later influence

The imperial anthologies from the Kokin Wakashu (905) inherited the aristocratic and refined side of Man’yo somon while excluding the commoner and bodily side of the eastern and frontier-guard songs, and the sexual expression of waka grew steadily more indirect and aestheticised, converging on the “courtly” beauty of Heian court literature. Much of the vocabulary and rhetoric of the sexual depiction in Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and other Heian tales is already latent in the Man’yoshu, set expressions such as “loosen the under-sash,” “wet the sleeve,” and “see in a dream” passing through the Man’yo accumulation.

In early-modern national learning, Kamo no Mabuchi praised Man’yo poems as “masculine” in contrast to the “feminine” elegance of Heian waka, a contrast that fed the modern Man’yo re-evaluation of Masaoka Shiki and Saito Mokichi and their Araragi school, a central axis of the Meiji and Taisho tanka renewal. In comparative poetics, Man’yo somon is examined alongside the palace verse and folk yuefu of the southern dynasties, the hyangga of the Korean Three Kingdoms, and the song-exchange traditions of Southeast Asian peoples, relativising the place of Man’yo within ancient East Asian love song.

See also

• Heian court sexuality
• Sexuality in the Kojiki
• Shunga