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Kokinshū-chū: The Oldest Surviving Commentary on Japan's First Imperial Anthology

A note at the close of one volume records that the copying was finished on the twenty-sixth day of the fourth month of Ninji 2, the year 1241, the brush worked by lamplight in the late hours. The two slim booklets that this note brings to an end hold the oldest surviving commentary on the Kokin Wakashū, the first anthology of Japanese poetry assembled by imperial order, completed around the year 905.

The commentary itself is older than the copy. It was written by the courtier and poet Fujiwara no Norinaga in the late 1170s, and for centuries afterward it was known only as a title quoted by later scholars. The text was thought lost. The manuscript now held at Kyoto University, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1942, is the copy through which Norinaga's readings of the Kokin Wakashū came back into view.

The Man Behind the Commentary

Fujiwara no Norinaga (1109–1180) belonged to the highest tier of the Heian court. He served the Emperor Sutoku, rose to the post of Consultant, and held the Senior Third Rank. He was also a calligrapher of the first order; the gate plaque of Rengeō-in, the temple hall in Kyoto better known today as Sanjūsangen-dō, survives in his hand.

His career broke in 1156. In the Hōgen Disturbance, a short and decisive armed conflict over the succession, Norinaga backed the retired Emperor Sutoku, who lost. He took Buddhist vows and surrendered, yet was not pardoned. The court sent him into exile at Ukishima in Hitachi Province, on the eastern edge of the realm in what is now Ibaraki Prefecture. Six years later he was recalled and withdrew to the monastic complex on Mount Kōya.

It was as a monk, decades after his fall, that Norinaga produced the commentary. A colophon in the Kyoto University copy notes that the instruction behind it was received in 1177. By then he had outlived the politics that ruined him and turned to the poems of the Kokin Wakashū, the work that every educated person of his age had committed to memory.

Why the Manuscript Matters

The Kokin Wakashū shaped the Japanese sense of what a poem should be for the better part of a thousand years, and almost as soon as it was finished people began arguing about what its poems meant. Norinaga's was the first sustained attempt to explain them line by line. Later commentators built on him and disagreed with him, and a rival commentary by the priest Kenshō quotes him by name, which is how scholars knew the work had existed long before any copy of it turned up.

That copy surfaced only in the early twentieth century, after generations in which the text counted as lost. Cataloguers judged it to be a third-generation copy made roughly sixty years after Norinaga composed the original. It is incomplete: the opening of the preface is gone, and the text breaks off partway through the seventeenth book. Even so, it preserves a layer of reading that no other source transmits in full.

There is a second reason it is prized. The text is written for the most part in katakana, with a little hiragana in the lower volume and a scattering of hentaigana, the older variant kana forms that fell out of standard use. For historians of the Japanese language, a securely dated manuscript from 1241 is evidence in its own right, quite apart from what its words happen to say.

What to Look For

The two booklets are bound in the detchōsō style, in which folded sheets are pasted together along the fold rather than stitched, an early method that gives the closed book a soft, layered spine. The covers are old patterned textile, and the title slips are white paper worked with a design in gold pigment. The whole was kept wrapped in white silk inside a paulownia box, the standard armor for a treasured object.

The colophons reward attention. Beyond the famous lamplight entry, dated notes appear at the ends of several books, recording that the copyist finished the sixth book on one spring day in 1241 and the fifteenth on a summer night that same year. An attribution slip names the copyist as the nobleman Nijō Morotada, though that identification is uncertain and has never been confirmed.

The manuscript is not on regular public display. Kyoto University has, however, digitized it in full and placed high-resolution images online through its Rare Materials Digital Archive, where the binding, the gold-flecked title slips, and the run of colophons can all be studied page by page. For most visitors this is the way to see it.

In the Neighborhood

The manuscript is held in the Yoshida district of Kyoto's Sakyō Ward, the area around the main campus of Kyoto University. The Kyoto University Museum nearby rotates parts of the institution's collections into public view and is the closest place to encounter the university's holdings in person. Up the slope sits Yoshida Shrine, founded in the ninth century and quiet on most days.

For old manuscripts and calligraphy seen up close, the Kyoto National Museum in the Higashiyama district is the best destination in the city. It stands beside Sanjūsangen-dō, the very hall whose gate plaque carries Norinaga's writing, so a single afternoon can take in both the museum's classical holdings and a surviving example of his brush.