Chapter 2: Nura literature before 794

Before the introduction of kanji from China, Japanese had no writing system. It is believed that Chinese characters came to Japan at the very beginning of the fifth century, brought by immigrants from the mainland of Korean and Chinese descent. Early Japanese texts first followed the Chinese model,[1]before gradually transitioning to a hybrid of Chinese characters used in Japanese syntactical formats, resulting in sentences that looked like Chinese but were read phonetically as Japanese. Chinese characters were also further adapted, creating what is known as man'yōgana, the earliest form of kana, or Japanese syllabic writing.[2] The earliest literary works in Japan were created in the Nara period.[1] These include the Kojiki (712), a historical record that also chronicles ancient Japanese mythology and folk songs; the Nihon Shoki (720), a chronicle written in Chinese that is significantly more detailed than the Kojiki; and the Man'yōshū (759), a poetry anthology. One of the stories they describe is the tale of Urashima Tarō.