The Ten Thousand Leaves Poems from the Man'yoshu

By: Ian Hideo Levy

Published by New York Review of Books, 2025-07-15

A sweeping anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love, war, trees and mountains, everyday life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accessible translation.

The first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū is considered, along with The Tale of Genji, to be one of the most important works in classical Japanese literature. The title means “anthology of ten thousand leaves,” the anthology of anthologies from the first flowering of artistic and literary sensibility during the Asuka and Nara periods—the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern “Dialogue of the Destitute”; from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the “poems of the frontier guardsmen.” As its title suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves is a gathering of poems of many kinds, from a period unparalleled in Japanese history.

This volume reproduces the first five books of the original Man'yōshū, with an introduction and notes by the translator, Ian Hideo Levy, whose elegant and informative edition was a finalist for the National Book Award.