Hitomaro: Poet as God (review)

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro's stately chōka in Man'yōshū, which mourn the passing of royals and lament his wife's death as well as their partings while she was alive, still move readers with their craft and emotional force. For this handful of poems alone, Hitomaro would be regarded as among the greatest practitioners of the classical Japanese verse tradition. In Hitomaro: Poet as God, however, Anne Commons focuses our attention on what she describes as the poet's "afterlife, the centuries-long process of his reception and canonization as a court poet and as an enshrined deity worshipped for non-poetic purposes" (p. 1). At each stage of her argument, Commons illuminates the manner in which the poet was re-imagined and re-presented according to the needs of different times and circumstances, through the application of "cultural pattern[s] or trope [s] visible in literary or religious discourse at that time" (p. 201). In this ambitious, richly detailed study, the author is attentive to both the literary and religious contexts of Hitomaro's canonization—the two processes reinforcing each other—and traces "the uses [Hitomaro] served as a poetic icon and legitimating symbol of poetry's antiquity and authority, as well as poetry's relationship to larger developments in religious thought" (p. 1). The literary and religious processes of canonization become integrated "in the development of modes of thought in which poets could become deities and poetry itself came to be regarded as sacred" (p. 2).

Commons opens her narrative by briefly examining the very few facts known about Hitomaro and his life and goes on to show how Man'yōshū begins to manufacture an image of an already esteemed poet and his life. Here and elsewhere in the Heian portion of her text, Commons focuses on two aspects of Hitomaro's presentation: textual statements about the stature of the poet and how the choice and staging of his poems or those more dubiously attributed to him contribute to the formation of his image. These two aspects are inextricably intertwined, since the choice and staging of his verses reflect the compilers' regard for the poet and become, in subsequent texts, the basis for further elaboration of his hagiography. Commons points out, for example, how Man'yōshū establishes Hitomaro's connection with Iwami (modern Shimane prefecture) as a sort of foundation stone: She argues convincingly that the arrangement of Hitomaro's well-known Iwami sōmonka (love poems) and banka (elegies) and their accompanying headnotes—those that speak of his parting from his wife in Iwami and the verses that record and lament his passing—"reflect clear editorial intent to construct a narrative of Hitomaro's life and death" (p. 12). Further, citing such scholars as Itō Haku and Hashimoto Tatsu, Commons points to the likelihood that the Iwami verses were fictive performance pieces recited by Hitomaro in his role as poet-performer in the court. In subsequent ages, Iwami is named variously as the site of Hitomaro's birth or his supernatural appearance, his death, and his governorship. Eventually, two shrines in the region were dedicated to him.

Man'yōshū includes as well, Commons shows, "the first explicit reference to Hitomaro as a great poet of an earlier age" (36), revealing not only the editors' desire to construct the poet's biography through his verses but the special status accorded many of Hitomaro's other compositions in that work. Two Heian-period royal collections, however, elaborate upon Hitomaro's biography and enhance his stature in new directions, bringing to the fore Hitomaro's "appropriation as a legitimizing figure by parties eager to reinforce their own poetic and political authority" (p. 2). "Probably the single most influential text in the entire history of Hitomaro's reception," Kokinshū, according to Commons, establishes Hitomaro as the "sage of poetry" (p. 39). Its kana preface elaborates on Hitomaro's biography, maintaining that he held the Senior Third Rank. It also declares that he was active in a time when...