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Textual tradition of the Man'yōshū

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The surviving manuscripts of the Man'yōshū, an 8th-century Japanese anthology of waka, are broadly divided into three groups: the koten-bon, the jiten-bon, and the shinten-bon.

The koten (古点, "old glossing") refers to the readings of the Five Men of the Pear Chamber (Kiyohara no Motosuke, Ki no Tokibumi, Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu, Minamoto no Shitagō and Sakanoue no Mochiki) from when they were commanded, in 951, to prepare readings of the Man'yōshū poems during their compilation of the Gosen Wakashū. Of the 4,500-odd poems of the collection, they prepared readings for around 4,100, which included virtually all of the collection's tanka (poems with a 5-7-5-7-7 metre) and roughly half of the sedōka (5-7-7-5-7-7), but hardly any of the chōka (longer poems with an indefinite number of 5-7 verses and concluding 5-7-7). The original koten manuscript no longer survives, but the shinten (新点, "new glossing") texts sometimes include colour-distinguished annotations, and in such texts the poems written in ink and without agreement are almost all poems that would have been included in the koten text (the "koten poems", 古点歌), so such texts are referred to koten texts, or koten-bon.

Jiten (次点, "following glossing") refers to glosses that were produced after the Five Men of the Pear Chamber but before Sengaku in the 13th century. The names of several of these "middle" annotators are known to history: in the notes to the koten text are Fujiwara no Michinaga, "the Ōe family" (possibly Ōe no Sukekuni or Ōe no Masafusa), Fujiwara no Atsutaka and Fujiwara no Kiyosuke; from prefaces Koremune no Takatoki (惟宗孝言) and Fujiwara no Nagatada [ja]; and from commentaries (etc.) Minamoto no Kunizane [ja], Minamoto no Moroyori [ja], Fujiwara no Mototoshi, Kenshō, and so on. Jiten texts are those that contain different coloured readings and that have the ink overwritten in red where the two agree. Between 193 and 355 poems (the "jiten poems", 次点歌) have such glosses, and the texts of that level are the jiten texts, or jiten-bon. They differ from the shinten texts in that they typically contain glosses written in hiragana on a separate line from the main text, although exceptions such as the Kasuga-bon and Koyō Ryaku Ruijū-shō (古葉略類聚鈔) give readings in katakana beside the Chinese characters. No full manuscripts of all 20 books of the anthology survive from this period, and information on the jiten readings is gleaned from quotations in poetic treatises (kagaku-sho [ja]) such as Kenshō's Shūchū-shō (袖中抄) and from Man'yōshū poems that were included in imperial and personal collections.

Notes

  1. The Man'yōshū was compiled before the birth of Japan's indigenous writing systems, hiragana and katakana, and so its Japanese-language poems are written with a complex writing system using Chinese characters sometimes for their meanings and sometimes for their indigenous Japanese or sino-Japanese pronunciations.

References

Citations

  1. Hayashi 1983, p. 566.
  2. Inaoka 1983, p. 562.
  3. Inaoka 1983, pp. 562–563.
  4. Hayashi 1983, pp. 566–567.
  5. ^ Hayashi 1983, p. 567.

Works cited


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