Konjaku Monogatarishu

Nine Volumes, National Treasure since 1996

Konjaku Monogatarishu (今昔物語集) is a manuscript at Yoshida-honmachi, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture, designated a National Treasure on 27 June 1996. The quantity is nine volumes and the owner is Kyoto University, a national university corporation.

This is the first property here owned by a national university corporation. Owners so far have been temples and shrines, religious corporations, individuals, a public-interest foundation, the state, an independent administrative institution, a joint-stock company and an inter-university research corporation.

A listing in 1996 is among the more recent encountered here, and the record is correspondingly full.

The Work's Own Title Rests on This One Copy

One sentence in the Agency's commentary stands out.

Each volume opens with the heading Konjaku Monogatarishu, volume such-and-such, followed by the section name indented by one character and then the individual headings, and it is by this manuscript alone that the title Konjaku Monogatarishu can be established.

The name of the work itself rests on this one copy. In other manuscripts the title cannot be settled.

Titles have come up before: transcribed from a sword's inscription, or carrying a note of loss as with the Gobu Shinkan scroll. Those were the titles of properties.

This is different. What depends on this single copy is not the property's title but the name of the work.

No Colophon, and Yet a Date

The time of copying is treated as well.

There is no colophon of transcription, but from the large format, the paper and the style of writing, it is recognised as a copy of the middle Kamakura period.

No colophon. Even so, three grounds are given: format, paper and hand.

With the Vajrabhadrani Sutra, a colophon transcribed into the notes fixed the year at 686. Where a colophon exists the year can be settled; where none exists, the object itself must be read.

The date of composition is given too: the collection is the largest of its kind in Japan, and its compilation is thought to fall in the first half of the twelfth century.

Composed in the early twelfth century, copied in the middle Kamakura period. The Agency's era field reads Heian. The age of the work and the age of this copy are not the same.

Two Sets of Dimensions, and Leaves Counted by Volume

The dimensions field is specific.

Present dimensions: 32.4 centimetres by 28.1 centimetres. Dimensions of the text paper, for volume two: 29.6 centimetres by 24.2 centimetres.

Two sets of measurements. A recent repair added new covers, so the size of the object now differs from the size of the paper the text is written on.

The leaves are counted volume by volume: 81 in volume two, 61 in volume five, 58 in volume seven, 61 in volume nine, 55 in volume ten, 63 in volume twelve, 61 in volume seventeen, 50 in volume twenty-seven and 62 in volume twenty-nine.

Nine volumes survive, and their numbers do not run in sequence: two, five, seven, nine, ten, twelve, seventeen, twenty-seven, twenty-nine.

The form of the text is recorded as well: eleven lines to the half-leaf, about twenty-eight characters to the line, each tale opening with the word for long ago and closing with a fixed formula, written in a mixed script with small katakana.

Provenance Traced by Matching Other Records

How the book came down is shown by method.

Some volumes carry a later reader's note signed with a name, and volume twenty-seven records that the writer had read the book through and remarks on the opening of the gates at the Kasuga shrine.

That note matches an entry dated the seventh month of 1446 in a monastic diary index, and together with a record of the work being lent, dated the fourth day of the seventh month of 1451 in another monastic memorandum, it draws attention in considering how the book was handed down at Nara.

Words written into the manuscript agree with dated entries in separate records, and from that agreement its whereabouts are inferred.

The Taihi Tenmoku bowl's provenance closed with it is said. Here documents that can be checked against one another are named.

Kyoto University owns the manuscript, held in its library. It is not kept on permanent display, and consultation follows procedures the university sets.