This is the second volume to be published in the 20-volume set. It includes 114 poems (104 tanka, ten choka), traditionally considered to be the zoka genre, although some of them can be classified as benka, since they deal with death and sorrow. It also contains two poems in Chinese. The volume has several long introductions (all written in Chinese) to the poems that follow. All the poems in this volume were composed between AD 724 and 733, which represents a much greater homogeneity in comparison to books one to four. Most of the poems were written by Yamanoue-no Okura (AD660-733), one of the greatest Man'yōshū poets, who was possibly a Korean from Kudara (Paekche), or at least a descendant of Kudara immigrants to Japan. The spelling system in this volume is predominantly phonographic, with only a few exceptions. In addition, the spelling system appears to reflect Early Western Old Japanese, as demonstrated by Bentley (1997, 2002). The same can be said about its overall grammatical features.

Author: Alexander Vovin
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Brill
Published: 01/25/2011
Series: Man'yōshū #5
Pages: 195
ISBN: 9781906876203


Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2011 pg. 177

About the Author
Alexander Vovin a Russian-born American historical linguist and philologist currently holding the position of Directeur d'études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Centre de recherche sur les langues de l'Asie Orientale) in Paris. He has previously held appointments at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg (1983-1989), the University of Michigan (1990-1994), the Miami University (1994-1995), and the University of Hawai'i (1995-2013). Alexander Vovin's main interests include the early history of Japanese, Mongolian, Korean, Ainu, Manchu and other Inner and East Asian languages, as well as the early ethnolinguistic history, textology, and literature (especially poetry) of these regions. He is an author or an editor of about 100 articles and seventeen books including A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu (Brill 1993), A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose (Routledge 2003), Koreo-Japonica (University of Hawai'i Press 2010), and A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese (a revised edition of which will appear in Brill's HdO series in 2020). Together with Dieter Maue, Alexander Vovin has discovered and deciphered the earliest Mongolic language from the 6th-7th centuries AD, pushing back our knowledge of known Mongolian text by seven centuries. He is also the editor of Brill's series Languages of Asia (2003-) and co-editor (with Prof. Juha Janhunen, Finland) of the International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics (Brill 2019-). Alexander Vovin honors being elected as member of the Academia Europaea (2015), receiving the 2015 prize of the Japanese National Institute for Humanities, and receiving a European Research Commission Advanced Grant for the multinational project An Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages (2019-2023).