Born into the powerful Otomo clan, long tied to military command and court service. Growing up in the Asuka-to-Nara transition, he absorbed classical learning and the etiquette of the Yamato elite.

As a youth he trained in court ceremony, Chinese-style letters, and poetic composition valued by the ritsuryo state. This education prepared him to serve in a bureaucracy increasingly modeled on Tang institutions.

After the Taiho Code reorganized government offices, he advanced as a trusted aristocratic official. He learned how rank, taxation, and provincial administration worked within the centralized Nara court system.

When the capital settled at Heijo-kyo, he continued service amid intense factional politics and ritual life. The new capital’s temples and ministries fostered both competition for posts and flourishing literary culture.

By middle age he was recognized for waka that blended personal feeling with formal diction. His work aligned with the emerging Man'yoshu tradition, where public duty and private emotion could coexist in verse.

Under Emperor Shomu, court politics and state Buddhism grew more prominent, shaping the atmosphere of high office. He navigated shifting alliances among aristocratic houses while maintaining a reputation for cultivated restraint.

He was sent to Dazaifu, the key administrative and defensive hub for western Japan. The post demanded oversight of coastal security, trade, and diplomacy, with attention to envoys and threats linked to the Korean peninsula.

In exile-like distance from Nara, he gathered officials and literati for poetry, wine, and learned conversation. This circle helped make Dazaifu a celebrated provincial center, linking governance with artistic refinement.

He encouraged the younger poet Otomo no Yakamochi, who later became a major Man'yoshu figure and editor-associated presence. Their relationship reinforced the Otomo clan’s reputation for both state service and poetry.

At a plum-blossom banquet, he and companions composed poems celebrating fragrance, season, and fellowship. The gathering’s preface and verses became iconic examples of cultured life at Dazaifu within the Man'yoshu milieu.

His Dazaifu poems often juxtaposed elegant imagery with loneliness and the weight of office. The physical and political distance from Heijo-kyo sharpened his voice, turning administration into a backdrop for introspection.

As head of Dazaifu he supervised provincial reporting, logistics, and defense planning along routes facing the continent. The job required steady coordination with Nara ministries while responding to local realities in Kyushu.

Late in his Kyushu tenure, illness and separation from family weighed heavily on him. His poems from this period convey fatigue and clarity, showing how Nara aristocrats confronted impermanence amid public duty.

After years in Kyushu, he was recalled toward central service as his health worsened. The return underscored how appointments could feel like both honor and banishment within the rigid ritsuryo hierarchy.

He died in 733, remembered as a high-ranking noble who fused governance with literary achievement. Later readers valued his Man'yoshu poems for their poised diction and their candid sense of longing and mortality.

As the Man'yoshu took shape in the mid-8th century, his works were preserved among its landmark poems. The anthology’s compilers and readers treated his Dazaifu circle as a model of provincial sophistication.