Life gives us such beauty and pain, sometimes in almost equal measures.  I find solace in reading selections from the great Man’yoshu, this document from 8^th century Japan.  I have written here before about this great collection of over 4500 poems, but of course, not all of them appeal to our modern senses and tastes.  In particular the love poems from the Man’yoshu, written over a span of 130 years, are poems that liberate us, throw us into a free-floating dreamscape, where our sentiments connect within those lovers who lived 1500 years before us.

The passion of these poems cannot be denied.  They speak over the centuries to our own hearts, and in some lucky cases, to our own experience to each poem, but this not fully my own interpretation.  I am relying on commentary by Ooka Makoto and translations of Ian Hideo Levy, from “Love Songs from…