This talk examines how sonority—whether imagined as dialect, music, or oral performance—was textually staged in premodern Japanese poetry through two case studies: Azuma uta 東歌 "songs of the Eastland" from Man'yōshū 万葉集 “Collection of Myriad Leaves” (ca. 759) Books XIV and XX, and fuzoku uta 風俗歌 “regional songs” preserved across several Heian period fuhon 譜本 “songbooks.” While these texts are often regarded as authentic reflections of speech or musical practice, I argue they are better understood as literary simulations of sonority, evoking, rather than documenting, acoustic phenomena.
Recasting Man'yōshū’s Azuma uta as stylized literary constructs that deployed a kind of “literary vernacular”—a curated illusion of vernacularity, instead of a true reflection of oral speech, where selective dialect features (e.g., phonology, lexicon) were retained as stylistic markers while being subordinated to courtly literary conventions. Where Azuma uta manipulate dialect as a literary device, the fuhon preserving fuzoku uta perform an analogous mediation for musical performance; their lack of detailed notation reveals them to be literary proxies for orality that are thus less documents of performance than performances of documentation—textual pageants of a musicality and vernacularity in the courtly imagination.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum