Kokin Wakashū, Volume 9, Fragment (Kaitei) (said to Have

Fourteen Lines Cut from a Twelfth-Century Scroll

The Fragment of Kokin Wakashū Book Nine on Waxed Paper (古今和歌集巻第九断簡（蝋牋）〈伝俊頼筆〉, Kokin Wakashū maki daikyū dankan, rōsen, traditionally attributed to Minamoto no Toshiyori) is a Heian-period calligraphic fragment carrying part of Book Nine of Japan's first imperial poetry anthology, designated an Important Cultural Property on 18 December 1959 and held today by a private owner in Aichi Prefecture. It is mounted as a single hanging scroll measuring 25.8 by 44 centimetres, written in ink on two joined sheets of waxed decorated paper, and carries fourteen lines of text.

Fourteen lines is a small thing to designate. What the fragment holds, and what it turns out to be half of, is not.

Two Poems on a Journey

The national register records where the text starts and stops. It opens with the words Kai no kuni ni makari haberikeru toki, and closes with Futami no ura wa akete koso mime. Those two phrases fix the contents precisely.

Book Nine of the Kokin Wakashū is the travel section, sixteen poems in all. The opening phrase is the headnote to poem 416, by Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, one of the four compilers of the anthology. Mitsune composed it on the road while going down to Kai Province, the mountainous region west of Mount Fuji that is Yamanashi today: nights are cold, so I brush away the first frost as it settles and sleep again and again on a pillow of grass. The verb in the last phrase carries a pun on repeated nights and travel sleep, and the poem is generally read as autumn.

The closing phrase is the final line of poem 417, by Fujiwara no Kanesuke (877 to 933), the courtier known as the Tsutsumi Chūnagon and, incidentally, Murasaki Shikibu's great-grandfather. Its headnote is unusually specific about circumstance. Kanesuke was travelling to the hot spring of Tajima Province, generally identified with Kinosaki, and stopped for the night at a place called Futami-no-ura. Over the evening meal of dried rice, the party began exchanging poems, and this was his contribution: the evening moon leaves things uncertain, so let the bay of Futami be opened, and seen, at dawn.

The wordplay is dense even by Kokinshū standards. Tamakushige, a jewelled comb box, functions as a set epithet leading to futa, the lid, which produces the place name Futami. Akete means both to open the box and for the day to break. Where Futami-no-ura actually was remains unsettled: one reading places it at Futami in modern Akashi on the Inland Sea, another near Kinosaki on the Sea of Japan coast.

So the fragment preserves two poems with their headnotes: a compiler on a cold road to Kai, and a nobleman at supper by an unnamed bay. Fourteen lines, and the whole texture of Heian travel poetry sits in them.

The Paper Is the Point

The register describes the physical object with a care it does not extend to most objects: ink on rōsen, two sheets joined, the first sheet yellow, the second vermilion, each bearing underdrawings of human figures, mounted as a hanging scroll.

Rōsen is Chinese decorated paper. A woodblock is placed beneath the sheet and the design is pressed through without ink, a blind printing that leaves a raised pattern, and the surface is treated so that it takes a low waxy sheen. The pattern appears only when light strikes it obliquely. Northern Song workshops produced it, Japanese aristocrats prized it as an import, and it was reserved for writing that mattered.

Underdrawings of human figures are rare on this paper. Most rōsen carries plant scrolls, peonies, or geometric bands. Research published by the Okura Shukokan, which holds the related National Treasure, identified what the figures on this fragment's vermilion sheet actually are: an empress and her attendant noblewomen. The matching sheet in the Okura scroll shows a king and his senior ministers in what appears to be a Chinese palace. Set the two side by side and the lines of the buildings behind them join up. The two sheets were cut from one continuous design, and the figures were made to face each other across it.

A fragment in a private collection in Aichi and a National Treasure in a Tokyo museum are, at the level of the paper, two halves of the same picture.

The Kansubon Kokinshū and Its Scattering

The parent manuscript is known as the Kansubon Kokinshū, the scroll-format Kokinshū, produced early in the twelfth century as twenty scrolls of poems plus the kana preface, twenty-one in all. Only the preface survives intact, as a National Treasure at the Okura Shukokan, its paper made of thirty-three sheets of Chinese decorated paper in white, deep vermilion, pale vermilion, indigo, light blue, green and yellow. A partial scroll of Book Thirteen survives in the Agency for Cultural Affairs collection. Everything else exists as fragments.

They were not lost by accident. From the late sixteenth century onward the tea ceremony created demand for short, elegant pieces of old calligraphy to hang in the alcove, and complete scrolls were cut up to supply it. A single scroll could yield a dozen saleable pieces. The practice produced the entire genre of kohitsugire, old calligraphy fragments, and destroyed the manuscripts that supplied them. Fragments from this Kokinshū are now held by institutions including the Tokyo National Museum, the Kyoto National Museum, the Hatakeyama and Tokiwayama collections, the Yōmei Bunko and the Maeda Ikutokukai.

The traditional attribution to Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055 to 1129), the poet who compiled the Kin'yō Wakashū and wrote the poetic treatise Toshiyori Zuinō, is a connoisseur's assignment rather than a signature. Attributions of this kind were issued by the Kohitsu family, hereditary appraisers of old calligraphy, and the den prefix in the property's official name marks exactly that status. Current scholarship favours Fujiwara no Sadazane (1077 to 1119), great-grandson of the celebrated calligrapher Fujiwara no Yukinari; the Agency's own Cultural Heritage Online entry for a companion fragment from Book Sixteen names Sadazane directly.

One note on the property's official name: the character for rō in rōsen appears in the national database as a substitution mark, since the database cannot render it. The paper type is recorded as 蝋牋 in the physical description field, which is how the name should be read.

Access and Where to See Related Work

This fragment is not open to the public. It belongs to a private owner in Aichi Prefecture, there is no display venue and no address in the register, and photography is not possible. Hanging scrolls in private hands are lent to exhibitions on calligraphy or decorated paper from time to time, but no schedule can be consulted in advance.

Anyone who wants to see this manuscript in some form has better options through its siblings. The Okura Shukokan in Toranomon, Tokyo, holds the kana preface and shows it periodically; the museum's collection totals roughly 2,500 works including three National Treasures, and only one piece is on permanent view, so checking the current exhibition before travelling is essential. Cultural Heritage Online, the Agency's public database, carries entries with images for companion fragments from Books Four and Sixteen, which is the fastest way to see what this paper and this hand look like.

For the poems themselves, no visit is required. Book Nine of the Kokin Wakashū is short, widely printed and available in English translation, and reading poems 416 and 417 in sequence takes about a minute. It is a useful minute to spend before looking at the fragment, because the object is fourteen lines of writing and knowing what they say changes what there is to look at.