Assembling the Man’yō Woman: Paratext and Persona in the Poetry of Ōtomo no Sakanoue

Despite her significant corpus of poetry in Japan’s oldest vernacular poetic collection, the Man’yōshū, Lady Ōtomo no Sakanoue has been for the most part neglected in scholarship on premodern Japanese literature and the history of women’s writing. When her work is mentioned, it is either framed as simply containing early examples of a style of love poetry that came to define much of women’s compositions in later periods, or deemed valuable for its biographical information about the author with little consideration of its relation to broader narratives about the old aristocratic family to which she belonged. The goal of this project is to challenge two notions that permeate scholarship on women’s writing in early Japan up to this point: 1) that the poetic category in which most women, including Sakanoue, composed poetry was devoid of any political significance and 2) that women such as Sakanoue exist separately from larger cultural narratives surrounding the sociohistorical conditions of the imperial court during her lifetime. Following recent trends in Man’yō scholarship that advocate for reading the anthology as a text, this study applies concepts such as Michel Foucault’s “author function,” and G�rard Genette’s paratext to anthological elements such as headnotes, endnotes, and sequencing, in order to demonstrate how the figure of Sakanoue operates in the anthology as a symbol of the Ōtomo lineage’s poetic prowess as well as their devotion to the imperial throne. As her nephew was likely the final compiler for the volumes in which Sakanoue appears, I contend he chose to highlight her poetry not simply because of their close relationship, but also in order to recuperate their family’s image in the wake of political misfortune