The Ten Thousand Leaves: Poems from the Man'yoshu

A sweep anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love poems, war, trees and mountains, quotidien life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accesible translation.

Winner of the 1982 American Book Award for Translation

The first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man’yōshū is considered, along with the Tale of Genji, to be one the two most important works in classical Japanese literature. In Japanese the title means “Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves,” the “anthology of anthologies” from the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan during the Asuka and Nara periods—the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of the laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern “Dialogue of the Destitute,” from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the “poems of the frontier guardsmen.” As its name suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves represents a culling of what was considered the best from an epoch of cultural and literary innovation perhaps unparalleled in Japanese history.

This edition incorporates books one through five of the twenty that make up the original Man’yōshū and includes an introduction by the translator that provides a general historical and cultural background for this monumental work.