SOURCE: Miller, Roy Andrew. “The Lost Poetic Sequence of the Priest Manzei.” Monumenta Nipponica: Studies in Japanese Culture 36, no. 2 (summer 1981): 133-72.

In the following excerpt, Miller probes the editorial reconstruction of the Man'yōshū over the centuries, examining the myriad ways in which the anthology has been rearranged by focusing on an author of seven Old Japanese poems in the collection, Kasa Maro, better known as the Priest Manzei.

We still understand very little—and we know far less than we would like to—about the ways in which the Man'yōshū was originally put together.¹ That the overriding motivation for the compilation of this, the first anthology of Old Japanese poetry, must be traced to the powerful stimulus generated by the importation of Chinese poetic anthologies to Japan—and particularly to growing Japanese familiarity with the Wen hsüan² as well as with subsequent compilations of T'ang...