Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation

17. Primitive Vision: Heidegger’s Hermeneutics and Man’yōshū

189 17 Primitive Vision Heidegger’s Hermeneutics and Man’yōshū Thomas LaMarre Acts of seeing abound in the songs of Man’yōshū, particularly in the earliest songs of this collection, which is often celebrated as the oldest anthology of Japanese verse (compiled around 759). There are so many evocations of vision, so many different kinds of seeing, and a range of different characters for acts of seeing that become entwined with verbs, nouns, and adjectives to form a series of visual refrains that catch the imagination, even in translation: “gazing to recall fondly” (mitsutsu shinobu), “fair to behold” (mireba sayakeshi), or “never tire of seeing” (miredo akanu). In this song by the legendary bard Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (fl. 689–700), eyes follow the currents of the river as they slide away, To go back, to go again and see again the slick course of the Yoshino river uninterrupted with eyes never sated (miredo akanu)!1 The ceaseless flow of the river matches an act of seeing that never ceases to course after the waters, that never knows satiation. Like the waters that never disappear even as their currents slide away, the act of seeing suggested by miredo akanu flows incessantly, insatiably. Visual refrains such as miredo akanu repeat with the force of incantation or invocation. With as many as fifty examples of miredo akanu or related expressions in the Man’yō collection,2 acts of seeing provide a tentative point of departure for making generalizations about an anthology that resists simple characterizations. Man’yōshū—the “Collection of Myriad Leaves” or “Collection of Ten Thousand Ages”—is a vast collection of poetic forms. Its twenty scrolls with some 4,516 poems present multiple experiments with scripts, songs, commentaries, and principles of organization. What is more, many of its attributions, such as Hitomaro, are apocryphal, an evocation of legendary names that impart an aura or conjure up the style of an era. Apparently, a number of scribes and poets com- piled different scrolls at different times with poems from different eras. Finally, around 759, Ōtomo no Yakamochi gathered various compilations and made his own additions to them. The result is not so much a unification of diverse forms as a series of different modes of synthesis. With no single principle of organization, the collection reads as if it were another manifestation of the conflicts and interactions among peoples, languages, techniques, forms, and concepts that characterized the emergence of an imperial court on the Japanese archipelago in the seventh and eighth centuries. It is against such a multiplicity of forms that a visual refrain such as miredo akanu promises a point of departure for thinking about the stylistic and conceptual framework of Man’yōshū—particularly for songs associated with the two “early” periods, that is, roughly from 645 until the death of Empress Jitō in 702, whose passing marked a dramatic shift in poetic composition.3 The mode of seeing associated with “early” Man’yō songs not only promises a way to conceptualize the worldview implicit in ancient poetic styles but also introduces a rough historical framework. Tribal Histories and “Primitive” Seeing In the first volume of Nihonjin no Kokoro no Rekishi (The History of the Heart of the Japanese), Karaki Junzō characterizes acts of seeing in Man’yōshū to delineate a history of early Japan. “There is something artless about the usage of miredo akanu,” he writes. “There is a passionate frankness. It sees into nature, that is, into things like the leaves on trees, the bush clover, the seashore, or the moon, the river. It gazes, almost eating into things.”4 He adds that songs that use miredo akanu “are all thought to be of the early or middle Man’yōshū.” Yet, by the late Man’yōshū, a profound transition was under way. No longer did poems entwine seeing into acts of singing, recalling, longing, or thinking or weave visual subjectivity into the phenomenal world. Finally, by the time ofKokin Wakashū (c. 905), the verb “to see” was hardly ever used.5 The heart/mind (kokoro) appears in the place of the eye, and instead of seeing, there emerges a world of feeling/thinking (omohu). In short, Karaki maps the historical changes that occurred across the eighth and ninth centuries in terms of visual transformations, and he interprets these changes in terms of a kind of fall from oneness with nature. Already in the songs of the late Man’yōshū, he...