Korai Futai Sho (Vol. 1 and 2 (first Edition) / Handwritten

The hand of an eighty-four-year-old poet

At the close of the second of two slim booklets, the writer added a note recording that he had compiled the work in his eighty-fourth year. The hand was that of Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), also read Toshinari, one of the most influential poets and critics of the late Heian and early Kamakura courts. The two volumes are the Korai Fūteishō, usually rendered in English as "Notes on Poetic Style Through the Ages." This particular set, kept by the Reizei family in Kyoto, is the only surviving copy written entirely in Shunzei's own brush.

Shunzei finished this first version in 1197 (Kenkyū 8). He had been asked to set down his thinking on how good poetry should be made by Princess Shikishi (1149–1201), a daughter of the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa and a gifted poet in her own right. Tradition holds that she supplied the paper, a costly material at the time. He returned to the project four years later and produced a revised version in 1201, by then eighty-eight. The Reizei manuscript is the original of that earlier redaction of 1197.

Why a poetry manual became a National Treasure

The work falls into two parts. The upper volume sketches the history of Japanese verse and gathers 191 poems chosen from the Man'yōshū, the eighth-century anthology. The lower volume turns to the imperial anthologies, drawing close to four hundred poems from the Kokinshū down to the Senzaishū, the collection Shunzei himself had compiled. The exact counts differ slightly between the 1197 and 1201 versions. Running through the selections are Shunzei's own remarks, kept deliberately short.

That restraint was the point. Earlier writers on poetry had tended to pile up rules and learned references. Shunzei did something closer to the opposite. He let a long sequence of fine poems speak for itself and trusted the reader to absorb the quality of a style, its fūtei, by example rather than instruction. He is the critic most closely tied to yūgen, a sense of depth and quiet mystery, and to the value placed on yojō, the resonance a poem leaves once its words have ended. The treatise also draws an unusual line between composing verse and the Tendai meditative practice of shikan, "calm and contemplation," treating poetry as something close to a spiritual discipline.

Designated a National Treasure on 6 June 1983, the manuscript is prized on two counts at once. As a text, it preserves the earliest form of one of the central documents of Japanese literary criticism. As an object, it is the finest surviving witness to Shunzei's handwriting. The faithful Man'yōshū transcriptions carry a further, scholarly value as material for checking the wording of that much older anthology.

Reading the brush

The two booklets are modest in size. Each leaf measures about 28.9 centimetres tall and 20.8 wide, the upper volume running to 97 leaves and the lower to 95. Nothing about them is showy. What rewards attention is the brushwork itself: the unhurried, balanced line of a man who had spent more than seventy years writing verse and who, even at eighty-four, kept a remarkably steady hand. The calligraphy of the Reizei line is admired for exactly this quality of composure, and here it appears at its source.

It helps to remember what the document is not. This is not a finished presentation copy made by a professional scribe, but a working text in the author's own hand, complete with the dated colophon that fixes both its age and its authorship. Few literary classics survive in the original handwriting of their authors at all, and fewer still from the twelfth century. That rare combination is what sets this manuscript apart.

How to experience it

The Korai Fūteishō belongs to the Reizei-ke Shigure-tei Bunko, the foundation that cares for the library and house of the Reizei family, descendants of Shunzei through his son Fujiwara no Teika. The collection it heads is remarkable: five National Treasures and dozens of Important Cultural Properties, including Teika's diary Meigetsuki, with tens of thousands of items in all. Much of it survived because the family storehouse was kept under imperial lock for close to a century, from the 1620s until 1721, during an era when collectors were cutting up old manuscripts for use in the tea room.

The Reizei residence stands on Imadegawa Street north of the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds, ringed on three sides by the Imadegawa campus of Doshisha University. The house, rebuilt in 1790, is itself an Important Cultural Property and the last intact court-noble dwelling in the city. It opens to visitors only on rare occasions, usually in autumn, and even then the manuscripts are not shown there. The documents instead appear in special museum exhibitions from time to time. Anyone hoping to see the Korai Fūteishō in person should watch the schedules of major museums rather than plan a visit to the house.

The setting still repays a walk. The brick halls of Doshisha's historic campus, several of them Important Cultural Properties, stand a minute or two from Imadegawa Station, and the Zen temple Shōkoku-ji lies just to the north, with the Jotenkaku Museum on its grounds.