Collection of Little Princes

A Designated Treasure That Has Gone Missing

On the Agency for Cultural Affairs' public register of missing nationally designated properties sits a single manuscript album called the Koogimi-shu. The file holds a photograph of its cover leaf, a date of designation, and an appeal: if anyone has knowledge of the object, please contact the agency. The book itself has not been seen for some time, and its present location is unknown.

The Koogimi-shu is a Kamakura-period copy of the collected poems of Koogimi, a court poet active in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. It takes the form of one bound album (one jo), made in the gathered-quire style in which folded sheets are nested and sewn through the fold. Japan recognized it as an Important Cultural Property on 27 May 1939, in the category of calligraphy and manuscripts. The owner was a private individual in Kyoto Prefecture, which is part of why the album rarely appeared in public to begin with.

That an officially designated work can vanish from view surprises many visitors. Designation protects a property in law, but it cannot pin a privately held object to a fixed address across the decades. The register on which the Koogimi-shu now appears is the agency's standing request to the public for any sighting or information.

Who Was Koogimi?

Koogimi belongs to the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry, the canon of master poets selected by the courtier Fujiwara no Kinto around the start of the eleventh century, and she also appears among the Female Thirty-Six Immortals compiled later. Her dates of birth and death are not recorded, and even her parentage is uncertain. What survives is the shape of a career at court and a body of verse.

She served in the household of Empress Koshi, consort of Emperor En'yu, and later attended the future Emperor Sanjo as a lady-in-waiting during his years as crown prince. From that post she was known by the sobriquet Sakon. Her circle included Fujiwara no Kinto himself, the very arbiter who fixed the poetic canon, and tradition links her in a romantic attachment to the nobleman Fujiwara no Asateru. Her poems entered the imperial anthologies beginning with the Shui-shu, and they continued to be selected in collections after her lifetime.

A point worth pausing on for readers outside Japan: a personal poetry collection of this kind, a kashu, gathered one poet's own work rather than an editor's selection across many hands. The Koogimi-shu is that sort of book, the assembled verse of a single woman who wrote at the height of Heian court culture, the same milieu that produced Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu.

The reading of her name has never settled. The agency records the album as Kodai-no-kimi-shu, while the poet is commonly called Koogimi or Kookimi. The variation itself is a small reminder of how much about her has come down to us only partially.

Why It Was Designated

The value of the Koogimi-shu rests less on a famous calligrapher's name than on what it preserves and how. As a Kamakura-period transcription, it carried a Heian poet's collected work forward by hand at a moment when such anthologies were being copied, bound, and studied with fresh seriousness. Each surviving manuscript of a kashu is a textual witness, a chance to compare wording, ordering, and headnotes against other copies and to recover what the original might have held.

The binding matters too. The gathered-quire format, in which several folded sheets are nested into a quire and stitched through the spine fold, was the standard structure for poetry albums of the period. It allowed a book to lie open and turn smoothly, and it shaped how readers moved through a sequence of poems. The album form is also why the agency's file leads with a photograph of the jo, the cover or opening leaf, the face a reader would first have met.

When the designation was made in 1939, the album was a known and studied object. Its later disappearance does not undo that status. The record stands, the protection stands, and the hope of recovery is the reason the entry remains public rather than quietly closed.

Where to Encounter Koogimi's Hand Today

Because the album cannot be visited, the way to come close to Koogimi now runs through related works held in museums. The nearest is a group of calligraphy fragments known as the Koshigire, or "incense-paper cuttings." These come from a lost Heian anthology, the Reikashu, and are traditionally attributed to Koogimi's brush, though specialists treat the attribution as a tradition rather than a certainty, with some assigning the hand to Fujiwara no Kinto instead.

The name Koshigire comes from the paper itself, dyed a soft brown with clove, a treatment that both colored the sheets and helped repel insects. The writing runs in fluent, strongly connected lines that scholars date to the late eleventh or early twelfth century. Around ninety leaves are known, scattered across collections after the original booklet was cut apart, a fate common to prized Heian calligraphy.

Several public institutions hold pieces. The Kyushu National Museum keeps a Koshigire fragment, and the MIHO Museum near Shigaraki holds another mounted as a hanging scroll with floral brocade. The Maeda Ikutoku Kai in Tokyo preserves a portion from the old Maeda family collection, and Keio University holds a leaf as well. The Tokyo National Museum's celebrated album of calligraphy specimens, the Karigane-jo, includes a Koshigire among its sequence of Heian and Kamakura hands. Exhibition of these fragments rotates, since light-sensitive calligraphy is shown only for limited periods, so checking a museum's current display before a visit is wise.

Koogimi can also be met as an image. The Satake version of the Thirty-Six Immortals scrolls, among the most prized portrait sequences of the canon, includes a seated figure of Koogimi in court robes that has long drawn particular admiration. For the broader world these books belong to, the Nishi Hongan-ji manuscripts of the Thirty-Six Poets, a National Treasure and the oldest surviving compilation of the canon's personal collections, show what an intact set of such albums looks like.