A Waka Anthology, Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup, and: Volume Two: Grasses of Remembrance (review)

How does one teach poetry? Years ago I had a student in a class on medieval Japanese waka that put much emphasis on the historical setting of that poetry. The student had a life-threatening heart condition and therefore a very strong sense of urgency of what was important in life. After two sessions he left my class because, he explained, I "did not teach why waka are beautiful." Not much later, he died.

I regularly think of that student. Obviously I failed him, but I do not think that my course at the time was in itself misconceived. My aim was to historicize notions of poetry's functions in medieval Japan. Nevertheless, this student's argument brought home to me a fundamental paradox in teaching literature, and, perhaps more specifically, poetry. Students often come to a literature class because of an interest in the creative, potentially "universal," values of belles lettres. As an instructor and, more specifically, a scholar of medieval Japanese poetry, I saw it as my role to acquaint students with a cultural-historical context for the poems so that they could come to terms with value sets different from those of late twentieth-century Europe. In short, I tried to get away from reader-response appreciation and move toward an acceptance that cultural and aesthetic values may be culturally determined (and being rather influenced by Bourdieu at the time, I wanted students to understand that "culture," too, was potentially about power structures).

When teaching that class, I could not yet direct my student to A Waka Anthology, Edwin A. Cranston's massive project of translation and appreciation that aims to bring together a very wide sampling of traditional, largely courtly, poetry. The anthology, originally planned to be in four volumes, is structured according to the periodization of waka history established by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner in their landmark study Japanese Court Poetry.¹ As Cranston explains in the introduction to his first volume, the projected four volumes were to cover four major periods in waka history outlined in Brower and Miner's book: (1) primitive song and poetry, ca. 550-686, and the early literary period, 686-784; (2) the early classical period, 784- 1100; (3) the mid-classical period, 1100-1241; and (4) the late classical period, 1241-1502.² In the introduction to the second volume Cranston announces that he has modified and expanded this plan. The early classical period that was to be covered in the second volume is to take up two volumes, Volumes Two and Three. "Hence the originally envisioned Volume Three will become Volume Four, and so on up the line" (2:xx). Volume Two is further divided into Parts A and B. The reason for this reorganization was mainly bulk of material. The Heian period yielded increasingly voluminous bodies of poetry. Of course, after 1100, the production of poetry increased even more, so one wonders, not without some unease about completion of the project, what that will mean for future volumes. With these two volumes in three books we now have 2,251 pages of translation of, and commentary to, 4,302 poems. The numbers are daunting, the work already monumental, and we have yet to see the completion of the early classical period.

Volume One covers all the ancient songs (kayō 歌謡) found in Kojiki 古事記 (712), Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (720), the local gazetteers (fudoki 風土記) of the early eighth century, and Shoku nihongi 続日本紀 (797), followed by the pièce de resistance: a selection of 1,329 poems (that is, roughly 30 percent) from Man'yōshū 万葉集 (Collection for ten thousand generations; shortly after 759). The first volume ends with nineteen of the twenty...