Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Oyamada Tomokiyo’s personally-annotated copy of the Man’yōshū, I rethink “commentary” as an expansive category of endeavor serving a diversity of aims beyond interpretation alone. I show how in the early modern period it developed into a new system for the weaving of “language networks.”

Paper long abstract:

Oyamada Tomokiyo, a nativist scholar of the Edo period, left behind a personally-annotated copy of the Man’yōshū whose commentary, upon close examination, presents a number of notable characteristics. In particular, it betrays an apparent tendency towards philological irrationality, with Tomokiyo frequently supporting his arguments about the ancient Man’yōshū, not only with citations from much later works, but even with reference to the colloquial language of contemporary Edo. This is all the more surprising in light of exhortations by Tomokiyo himself in other works specifically not to thus rely on later documents, but instead to cite primary texts of relevant age. Such annotations might plausibly be marshaled as evidence for the charge of (at the least) methodological self-contradiction. There are, however, not only grounds for hesitating with the accusation, but reasons even to suspect that the appearance here of error expresses rather a purpose different from “logical commentary” altogether.

This alternative aim, I argue, lies in provision of a new tool, designed not for the exegetical reference of a single work, but rather for the search of a whole corpus. Such a tool would allow its users to trace the appearance of particular words and expressions across a broad range of different works annotated likewise. Fundamentally enabling this functionality were omnibus indexes, which contained information, spanning a library of works, on usage examples for particular items of vocabulary. Over the course of his life, Tomokiyo produced a large number of such indexes. With cases like his in mind, I propose to consider commentary as a phenomenon broader in scope than traditionally recognized, as indicating instead a wide array of activities both distinct yet akin, where exegetical annotations stand along a continuum with dictionaries and lexical indexes.

Focusing on Tomokiyo’s own contributions as illustrative examples of such a framework, I attempt to rethink “commentary” thus as an expansive category of endeavor serving a diversity of aims beyond that of “logical” interpretation alone. I show how in the early modern period it developed into what might be called a new system, one purposed for the weaving together of “language networks” at unprecedented scale.