It was Kamo-no-Mabuchi who first presented the view that the Tanka poems of the Hitomaro Kashu, which form part of the Manyoshu, are to be divided, according to the different usages of kanji, into two groups, "Ryakutai (abbreviated rendering)" and "Hiryakutai (un-abreviated rendering) respectively. He also concluded that the Ryakutai Tanka had nothing to do with Hitomaro as they had been written down in the Nara period. This view found its best heir in Mr. Toshio Goto, who endorced Mabuchi's view with a detailed study of both the classiacation of the poems and kanji usages. This present treatise, however, flatly denies Mabuchi's view. Unlike Mr. Goto's study, in which only makurakotoba and words abbreviated in the Ryakutai are put to thorough examination, all the words in the two groups are carefully compared with a result that many kanji usages and diction shared only by them are discovered. The writer also concludes that the Ryakutai Tanka were written in the Shucho era on the basis of the fact that the letter 朱 is used only in the Ryakutai, Hiryakutai, and some records of the Shucho era. The studies of the kanji usages also lead the writer to the following understanding of the nature of the Hitomaro Kashu and Hitomaro's works as a whole. When young, that was around the Shucho era, Hitomaro was greatly charmed by Chinese literature while on the other hand inherited much of traditional oral literature. He composed Taka orally in the manner of folk songs (the Ryakutai Tanka resmble folk songs in diction), and after a poem is finshed and sang in the public he recorded it using kanji in such a way. as what was written might have a semblance of a line of a Chinese poem, which hegrea tly admired. The fact should be noted that in the writing system of the Ryakntai Tanki a phrase or even a line corresponts to one or two kanji, which would have been impossible if the poem had been composed on the paper. Hitomaro had two contradictory cultural back grounds, one traditional the other foreign, which remained divorced while he was young but later gave him a possibility of creating his unique literature as a fusion or "sublation" of the two contradictory elements. Indeed this same process has been the fate of many great writers of this small island country down to the present day.
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