SOURCE: An introduction to The Ten Thousand Leaves, Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 3-33.

In the following excerpt, Levy describes the nature of Japanese poetry and profiles Hitomaro and other important contributors to the Manyoshu.

The Ten Thousand Leaves is Japan's first anthology of poetry and, to over a millennium of critical opinion, the greatest. Like the works of Homer for the West, like The Book of Songs for China, it represents both the classical fount of poetry and a model of expressive energy never surpassed.

As its name—Man'yōshū, literally “the collection of ten thousand leaves”—suggests, this is the “anthology of all anthologies” from the Asuka and Nara periods, which saw the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan. Apart from a few poems attributed to legendary times, and some others which may possibly be additions from as late as the ninth century...