Man'yōshū
Roughly forty-five hundred poems in twenty books, most of them in the thirty-one syllable tanka form, with longer chōka and formal laments for dead princes set among them. The voices belong to emperors, court officials, frontier guards posted to Kyushu and writing home, and anonymous farmers, all of it recorded before Japanese had a script of its own, in Chinese characters borrowed for their sound. The oldest surviving collection of Japanese poetry and the reservoir every later poet in the language draws from.
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Closest analogues
- 74% · 12 shared
- 70% · 11 shared
- 70% · 11 shared
- 68% · 12 shared
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- 63% · 10 shared