Remaining Volumes of the Kokin Wakashu (Sujikiri Version)

The Album That Stayed Whole Until 1952

For generations, a single bound album in the keeping of a Nagoya family held an intact upper half of the Kokin Wakashū, the anthology that shaped how Japan reads its own poetry. The book had survived as a complete volume into the twentieth century, long after most early manuscripts of the work had been cut apart and scattered. In March 1952 it was registered as an Important Cultural Property. Soon afterward, portions of it were separated and dispersed among collections, so that what carries the designation today is a surviving remnant rather than the whole.

That remnant is known as the Sujikiri, and it belongs to one of the most admired groups of calligraphy fragments from the Heian period. The name, the decorated paper, and the brushwork together explain why a few sheets of an eleventh-century poetry book are counted among the country's important cultural treasures.

The Kokin Wakashū and Its Place in Japanese Poetry

The Kokin Wakashū, usually shortened to Kokinshū, was Japan's first imperially commissioned anthology of waka, the thirty-one-syllable court poem. Compiled around 905 by order of Emperor Daigo, it was assembled by four poets led by Ki no Tsurayuki, who also wrote its famous preface in Japanese rather than Chinese. The collection runs to twenty books and roughly eleven hundred poems, organized by the seasons, by love, by travel and parting. For centuries afterward it set the standard for what a poem should sound like and how an anthology should be built.

Because the text mattered so much, beautiful manuscript copies of it were made and recopied throughout the Heian and later periods. Many were eventually divided into small sections to be mounted as hanging scrolls and album leaves for tea gatherings and connoisseurs, a practice that produced the broad family of fragments known in Japanese as kohitsugire, or pieces of old calligraphy. The Sujikiri is one of these, taken from a single sumptuous copy of the entire anthology.

Why the Sujikiri Was Designated

The designated remnant matters on two counts at once. It is a witness to the text of the Kokinshū as it was read and written out in the late Heian court, and it is a high example of the decorated-paper calligraphy that the period prized above almost any other art. Few surviving books bring the two together at this level of refinement.

Its value also rises from its company. The same hand is recognized in several of the most celebrated manuscripts of the age, including the Genei-bon copy of the Kokinshū dated to 1120 and the calligraphy of the Nishi Honganji albums of the thirty-six poets. A fragment that sits in that group is, in effect, a piece of a larger achievement in court writing. The 1952 designation recognized the surviving Nagoya album as part of that achievement.

What to Look For

The Sujikiri rewards slow looking. Two things in particular set it apart from an ordinary old manuscript: the paper it is written on, and the brush that crossed it.

Paper Made for One Purpose, Used for Another

The sheets were not plain. Their makers worked patterns directly into the pulp, including the cloudy bands of dyed color called tobikumo, or flying clouds, and a fine woven texture known as ramon. Over this they scattered crumpled flakes of gold and silver foil and brushed faint underdrawings in silver. Across each sheet ran ruled lines in silver, and it is these lines, resembling fine sinews, that gave the Sujikiri its name. The word means roughly the cut with the lines.

There is a quiet puzzle in those lines. The paper had first been prepared for a different use, laid out horizontally with five silver rules running across it for a poetry competition. When the sheets were taken up to make the Kokinshū album, they were turned ninety degrees and used upright, so the rules that were meant to run sideways now run vertically down the page. The reverse of the same paper carries a coarse, sieve-like cloth texture, and the fragments written on those back faces are known separately as the Tōgiri. The two are physically the front and back of one book.

A Hand Once Credited to a Master

For a long time the calligraphy was attributed to Fujiwara no Sukemasa, who lived from 944 to 998 and was counted among the three great brushes of the Heian court. Later study found that the writing does not match Sukemasa's own. The hand is now generally assigned to Fujiwara no Sadazane, a calligrapher active around the years 1077 to 1120 and a leading figure of the Sesonji school, descended from the renowned Fujiwara no Yukinari. The brushwork is slightly tall and light on its feet, balancing Chinese characters against the flowing kana with unusual ease, and it sets each poem in two or three lines.

Seeing the Sujikiri and Its Kin

The designated album is privately held and is not on regular public view, so a visitor cannot simply call on it. The good news is that the original book was so large, and was divided into so many pieces, that related leaves of the Sujikiri and the Tōgiri turn up in major museum collections across Japan, among them the Tokyo National Museum, the Kyoto National Museum, the Gotoh Museum and the Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo, and the Fujita Museum in Osaka. Any of these may show a leaf when its rotation of classical calligraphy comes around.

Closest to the designated work, the Menard Art Museum in Komaki, in the same Aichi Prefecture, holds a fragment of the Sujikiri among its collection. Like most institutions that own light-sensitive paper works, it brings such pieces out only for particular exhibitions, so anyone hoping to see one should check the current program before traveling.

Around Nagoya and Komaki

The Sujikiri's long association with Nagoya makes the city a natural base. The Tokugawa Art Museum there preserves the collection of the lords of Owari and holds the Sekido-bon Kokin Wakashū, a separate and equally celebrated set of fragments of the same anthology, written in a different hand and named for the same Nagoya family that once kept the Sujikiri. Seeing the two traditions side by side, when both happen to be on view, gives a rare sense of how varied the copying of a single classic could be.

Komaki, north of the city, offers a half-day of its own. The hill of Komakiyama carries the remains of the castle that Oda Nobunaga raised in 1563, a short climb with wide views over the plain, and it sits within walking distance of the Menard Art Museum. Both lie close to the Meitetsu Komaki Line, which connects to central Nagoya in well under an hour.