Later Selected Collection of Japanese Poems (written by

A Bound Volume Dated by the Hand That Copied It

At the back of this single bound book, the scribe recorded the day he laid down his brush: the second day of the third month of Tenpuku 2, the year we call 1234. He was seventy-three years old. His name was Fujiwara no Teika, and by then he stood as the most influential poet and editor of his age. That short note transforms an otherwise anonymous copy of an old anthology into something far rarer, a manuscript whose maker, date, and intent are all on record.

The book is small, 22.9 centimetres tall and 14.3 centimetres wide, with 202 leaves of paper. Into this compact codex Teika transcribed the whole twenty-book text of the Gosen Wakashū, the second of Japan's imperial waka anthologies. The Agency for Cultural Affairs counts it as one bound volume and lists it as a National Treasure in the category of calligraphy and classical texts.

The Anthology Teika Was Copying

The Gosen Wakashū had already existed for nearly three centuries when Teika set to work. In 951, Emperor Murakami established an Office of Waka in the Nashitsubo, the Pear Chamber of the palace, and charged five scholars with two jobs at once: annotating the ancient Man'yōshū and assembling a new imperial collection. Those five, remembered ever after as the Five Men of the Pear Chamber, included Minamoto no Shitagō and Kiyohara no Motosuke, with Fujiwara no Koretada presiding as director.

Their anthology came to twenty books and roughly 1,425 poems. The Gosenshū carries no preface, unlike the Kokin Wakashū that came before it. Its headnotes are long and frequently read like scraps of a story, and it collects an unusual number of poems exchanged between lovers, friends, and rivals. For that reason readers have long called it the most narrative of the early anthologies.

Why the Copy Outranks an Ordinary Manuscript

Teika copied texts with near-obsessive care, and his versions became the yardstick against which later scholars measured every rival manuscript. This volume is the original of what specialists call the Tenpuku-bon, the Tenpuku-era text of the Gosenshū, and for centuries it served as the authoritative reference copy for studying the anthology.

Three colophons at the back trace the book's life. The first, from the third month of 1234, marks Teika's completion of the transcription. The second, written a month later, records that he collated his text against a copy in the hand of Fujiwara no Yukinari, the famed calligrapher of two centuries before. The third is a deed of transfer: Teika's son Tameie handed the book to his own son Tamesuke. That note carries real weight, because Tamesuke went on to found the Reizei family, and the volume has remained in Reizei keeping from that day to this.

The pages are no tidy fair copy. In his own hand Teika slipped in stray poems, notes naming authors and explaining the prose headnotes, and comparisons drawn from variant texts. These marginal jottings let a reader follow the working method of the scholar who shaped how classical poetry was read for the next seven hundred years.

A Pair Kept Together for Eight Centuries

The Gosenshū volume never travelled alone. Eight years earlier, in 1226, Teika had copied the Kokin Wakashū into the same compact codex form, producing the manuscript scholars name the Karoku-bon. The transfer note that gave the Gosenshū to Tamesuke covered the Kokinshū as well, and the two books came down through the Reizei house side by side. The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated both as National Treasures on the same June day in 1983.

Placed together, the volumes reveal a man who treated copying as research rather than drudgery. The script runs controlled and even, dense notes crowd the margins, and red marks single out points of comparison. Anyone who has ever tried to reconcile competing versions of an old document will recognise the method at a glance.

How to Encounter It Today

The manuscript rests in the storehouse of the Reizei family, whose residence stands just north of the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds in Kamigyō Ward. The Reizei chose to stay in Kyoto when most court families followed the emperor to Tokyo after 1868, so their house, rebuilt in 1790 following a great fire, survives as the last kuge (court-noble) residence in the city. It holds its own status as an Important Cultural Property.

The house and garden open to visitors only briefly each year, typically for a few days around Golden Week in spring and again in late autumn, as part of Kyoto's special openings of normally closed cultural properties. Indoor photography is not allowed, and the original manuscripts usually stay in the family library rather than on display; the Teika autographs surface now and then in major museum exhibitions. Because the dates shift from year to year, checking the current schedule before a visit pays off.

Reaching the spot is easy. Imadegawa Station on the Karasuma subway line lies about a two-minute walk away, and the Imperial Palace, the Sentō garden, and the wooded grounds of Doshisha University all sit within a short stroll. A morning of poems in the palace gardens fits naturally beside a look at the house where the family who shaped those anthologies has lived for generations.