2019 Volume 101 Pages 65-80
In the manuscript for his late novel Shuppan (Setting Sail), Hori Tatsuo explored new literary possibilities by inserting poems from the Manyōshū into the prose text. With Hori's hand-written notes in volumes in his personal library as a starting point, I follow his creative process from Mizuno-ue (On the Water) through Shuppan. Furthermore, through a comparison of Shuppan and Rilke's The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, which it closely resembles in both setting and literary expression, I show that the use of ancient poetry in Shuppan supports the appearance of and resonance with collectivism, and suggest that this leads to a mechanism for salvation. I also point out that although Shuppan is the story of sakimori, ancient soldiers garrisoned on the coast of Kyushu, in the process of composing the novel Hori eliminated poems narrated by sakamori, thereby recreating the tale of sakimori using unrelated poems from the Manyōshū. I briefly examine Hori's methodology and its effectiveness.
