Empathy for the Dead: Hiomaros Poem on a Dead Man Among the Rocks

This talk examines various different readings of Hitomaro’s so-called “Dead Man among the Rocks” poem sequence (MYS 2: 220-22). I argue that no matter the conceptual framework or political sympathies of these readings, all converge around the problem of empathy and the question of the dead man’s personhood. My aim is therefore to bring these various readings into conversation with each other in order to respond to what my own interpretation argues is the poem’s demand of empathy from its readers.

Torquil Duthie is professor of Japanese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a specialist in the poetry, myth, and historical writing of ancient and medieval Japan. He is the author of Poesía clásica japonesa: Kokinwakashū (Editorial Trotta, 2005), Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan (Brill, 2014) and its Japanese translation and revised edition, Man’yōshū to teikokuteki sōzō (Kachōsha, 2023), as well as The Kokinshū: Selected Poems (Columbia University Press, 2023).