Hitomaro: Poet as God (review)

Those of us who teach courses introducing Japan's first millennium of poetic output in English-regardless of whether we call it classical, traditional, or premodern-are faced with the challenge of doing justice to the elaborately developed pedagogical apparatus that preserved this rich array of texts (rivaling anything in the European tradition) and that helped define it through a profoundly nonmodern blend of religiosity and aesthetic criticism. Hitomaro: Poet as God significantly enriches our appreciation of this social apparatus at the same time as it breaks new ground in our understanding of Japan's most iconic poet. Few dare to tackle the entire millennial sweep of pre-Meiji history, and it is to the author's credit that she has managed to tell a coherent, concise, and convincing account. Taken together, the details that accumulate around the textual figure of Hitomaro amount to a distinctive history of court poetry as its practitioners imagined it. In her own words, "his canonization can be situated within the context of the canonization of the genre of Japanese court poetry as a whole, reflecting its appropriation of modes of thought and practice from other cultural spheres" (p. 3).

The introduction succinctly states its author's intention to discuss Hitomaro in terms of his afterlife as a generic sign for Japanese court poetry rather than as a historical individual. By way of illustrating how little we have to go on in the latter case, we are given a brief summary of the few markers of identity provided by his full name. Some members of the Kakinomoto clan are known to have held modest rank at Tenmu's court. The first name Hitomaro, on the other hand, has intriguing connotations of its own as an "Everyman" (to use the author's apt translation) adopted by itinerant performers. What we are left with, then, are the shadowy outlines of a versifier (or versifiers) who traveled in the royal entourage and in other capacities throughout the surrounding provinces of the Yamato realm.

As chapter 1 demonstrates, Hitomaro's ambiguous status as both historical individual and fictional exemplar of a communal tradition haunts this Everyman's textual construction in the Man'yōshū. Commons focuses first on his famed sequence of laments over a traveler's corpse at Iwami, agreeing with Itō Haku that the speaker is a fictive pose adopted by a performer. She notes that this approach complicates the distinction between public and private so often applied to Hitomaro's most representative poems, which are typically divided into either formal eulogies and processional poems or personal outpourings of anguished bereavement. Overlying this putative performative original are what the author terms "layers of editorial mediation" (p. 19) carried out by the Man'yōshū's multiple compilers and readers through the placement of poems selected from an earlier eponymous anthology known as the Hitomaro kashū and through headnotes providing biographical details. Unlike other anthologies cited in the Man'yōshū, many verses from Hitomaro's collection appear at the head of series of topic-based poems as exemplary models. Another key intervention is provided by a later reader in the form of the headnote marking Hitomaro's ostensible death poem. The chapter concludes with a consideration of a binomial used to describe Japanese poetry by the Man'yōshū's chief poet, Ō tomo no Yakamochi, in an epistle to his cousin Ikenushi. Because the second character can denote more than one clan, the first character ostensibly referring to the Kakinomoto can be seen as the senior half of a communal metonym for the larger tradition of uta rather than a historical individual.

Chapter 2 takes the story of Hitomaro's textual construction as a poetic exemplar into the broader expanse of the Heian period. He first assumes greater definition as an individual in the Kokinshū prefaces, in which historical indeterminacy and use of Yakamochi's binary rhetoric amplify the sense of antiquity they bestow upon him. Commons argues that the description in the kana preface of Hitomaro as a "sage...