Sumiyoshi Tale

A small booklet that outlived the tale it carries

The Sumiyoshi Monogatari kept at the Naritasan Buddhist Library is modest in size, a booklet roughly 16 centimeters tall and 15 wide, nearly square, with covers of patterned paper and a lacquered storage box made to fit it. The dimensions give little away. Copied near the close of the Kamakura period, around the turn of the fourteenth century, it is the oldest surviving manuscript of a story that Heian-era readers already knew by name, and the copy that scholars of classical Japanese literature treat as the base for studying the whole work.

The tale itself is older than any copy of it that we can hold. Court writers of the eleventh century mention a Sumiyoshi Monogatari in passing: it surfaces in Sei Shōnagon's Makura no Sōshi (The Pillow Book) and in Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), proof that a version was circulating in the Heian capital. That early text is lost. What reached the Kamakura period, and what this Narita booklet preserves, is a later retelling written in deliberate imitation of the old courtly style.

A persecuted daughter and the Kannon who answered a dream

The story belongs to a family of tales built on the same painful premise: a child mistreated by a stepmother. A young noblewoman loses her mother, and her father's new wife schemes against her. Learning of the plot, the heroine flees the capital and takes refuge at Sumiyoshi, on the coast of what is now Osaka. The place gives the work its name.

Her rescue comes by way of faith. A young courtier of the third rank, Sanmi no Chūjō, has fallen in love with her and cannot find where she has gone. The Kannon of Hatsuse, the bodhisattva of Hase-dera temple, reveals her whereabouts to him in a dream. He travels to Sumiyoshi, finds her, and marries her; the couple return to the capital, she is reconciled with her father, and the scheming stepmother sinks into ruin. Good is rewarded and cruelty punished, with the Kannon's intervention turning the plot.

Literary historians classify the surviving text as a giko monogatari, an archaistic tale. Writers of the Kamakura period, looking back with longing at the vanished Heian court, composed new fiction dressed in the manners, vocabulary, and romantic conventions of two centuries earlier. The Sumiyoshi Monogatari is among the more accomplished of these, and its stepdaughter plot proved durable enough that the story was later remade as illustrated scrolls and Nara picture books.

Why a single booklet earned national protection

Japan designated this manuscript an Important Cultural Property on 25 April 1968. Its value rests less on beauty than on priority. Because the Heian original is gone and the Kamakura retelling survives only in scattered copies, the question of which copy stands closest to the source matters a great deal to anyone reconstructing the text. The Naritasan booklet, copied not long after the reworked tale was set down, sits at the head of that line.

Scholars know it as the Narita-bon, the Narita copy, distinguishing it from other notable manuscripts such as the one once held by the Tokugawa family and the copy in the Kyoto National Museum. Among them the Narita-bon carries particular weight as a foundation text. It is bound in the detchō style, with folded leaves pasted along the spine fold, and dressed in covers of leaf-patterned paper, the kind of quiet craftsmanship that signals a book meant to be kept rather than merely read.

One point of record is worth noting for travelers who like their facts firm. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives the designation date as 1968, and the Chiba prefectural listing agrees; a Narita city page cites an earlier date. The national database is the authority followed here.

Where it lives, and what to see around it

The manuscript is not on public display. It belongs to the Naritasan Buddhist Library, a closed-stack research library in the town of Narita run by the Naritasan Cultural Foundation, where staff retrieve materials on request and the holdings run to some 320,000 volumes with a strong Buddhist emphasis. Admission and reading are free. The library is a place for study rather than sightseeing, and the Sumiyoshi Monogatari stays in safekeeping, so a visit here is about the setting and the scholarly atmosphere more than a glimpse of the book.

The setting, though, is one of the most visited in the Kantō region. The library stands within the grounds of Naritasan Shinshoji, a major temple of the Shingon school founded in 940 and one of the busiest pilgrimage sites in Japan, drawing millions over the New Year. The walk up from Narita station along Omotesandō, lined with old shops selling grilled eel and pickles, ends at the temple's great gate, pagoda, and the hillside greenery of Naritasan Park behind it. Narita itself sits beside the international airport, which makes the temple town an easy first or last stop in Japan.

Anyone who wants to see the Sumiyoshi story rendered in pictures has a separate option. The Tokyo National Museum holds the Sumiyoshi Monogatari Emaki, the oldest surviving illustrated handscroll of the tale, a different object from the Narita manuscript but a vivid way to meet the same heroine. Its images can be viewed online through the museum's e-Museum portal.