Man Yōshū Analysis

The relationship of love and erotic in Man'yōshū were represented by poems which described many different feelings and various fates of many people. Those authors of poems described their own experience and their own moods. Poems drew a mixed picture of love.

Man'yōshū is the oldest Japanese collection of poetry. In this collection, poems are written by various authors which also made this collection of poems has a wide range of works. Love as a theme of the poems actually took a very important place in the collection. These love poems often contain different emotions. There are poems expressing the author fall in love with someone or poems expressing painful feelings about missing someone else. One interesting thing I noticed is that the

we can see that for Japanese people, being in love means attracting loved ones on the one hand and being unable to stay with them on the other hand would make them full of loneliness and sadness. The image represented by Man'yōshū , with depression, sadness, sorrow, coincides with the Japanese aesthetic tradition at some level. The introverted character of love consciousness has also become an important feature of Japanese love consciousness in later generations. For example, the samurai warrior in the spirit of 忍ぶ恋 is a pursuit of emotional internalized tolerance, from which to complete the experience of love and aesthetic beyond. If the love of westerners like oil paintings, gorgeous and unrestrained, then Japanese love more like woodcut, subtle but yet deep

Although love is one of the most important feelings of human beings, Japanese people also believed love is painful due to many unpredictable changes. I consider that these thoughts have many connections to the marriage custom during that period of time. The emergence of such a sense of love and the ancient Japanese marriage system has a direct relationship. During that time, although Japan imitated China's statutory law on marrying into marriage, in fact the marriage customs since the primitive society were widespread until the Muromachi period. In this form, there is no definite difference between the love and the marriage, but the principle of separation makes the separation into a normal state of love