The Seventh Remaining Volume of the Ruijuka Gosekan

A Scroll That Recorded the Poetry Battles of the Heian Court

On a handful of long winter and autumn nights in the late 1060s, members of the Heian court stayed awake together through the Kōshin vigil, a Daoist-derived custom that required keeping the eyes open until dawn. To fill those hours they held utaawase, contests in which poets divided into two sides and matched their thirty-one-syllable waka against one another. The handscroll known as the Ruijū Utaawase, Volume 7 Fragment (Ruijū Utaawase Maki Dai-nana Zankan) preserves the written records of several of these gatherings, including contests dated to the ninth day of the ninth month of 1067 and the twenty-third day of the twelfth month of 1068, both falling on nights of the Kōshin watch.

What remains is a single scroll, a surviving portion of what was once the seventh volume of a much larger work. It belongs to the Heian period and has been designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan since June 1942. The piece is held in Kyoto, the old capital where the contests it describes once took place.

The fragment is valued on two counts at once. It is a primary documentary source for poetry contests that might otherwise have left no trace, and it is a specimen of the refined brushwork of the late Heian aristocracy. Few objects let a reader stand so close to both the literature and the handwriting of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

What a Poetry Contest Was, and Why the Records Were Gathered

An utaawase worked something like a refereed match. Poets were sorted into a Left team and a Right team, each given a set topic, and their poems were paired off one round at a time. A reader chanted each poem aloud, supporters argued for their own side and picked at the weaknesses of the other in a debate phase called nanchin, and a judge then ruled the round a win, a loss, or a draw. The judge's reasoning, written down as the hanji, became a form of literary criticism in its own right. The earliest surviving example dates to around 885, and by the late Heian and early Kamakura periods these contests had grown from courtly amusement into serious arenas of poetic reputation.

Because the verdicts and the poems were recorded on the spot, individual contests generated documents that scholars and poets later wanted to consult. In the twelfth century the court set about collecting them. An earlier ten-scroll compilation gathered some forty-six contests but was never completed in a fair copy. A far larger project followed, assembling the records of more than two hundred contests into twenty scrolls. This is the work now called the Ruijū Utaawase, or the Twenty-Scroll Utaawase. Its compilation is thought to have proceeded in stages between roughly 1118 and 1131, with the powerful court figure Fujiwara no Tadamichi taking a leading part in the later phases.

The whole compilation was copied out by more than twenty different hands. That detail matters for the designation: surviving sections of the Ruijū Utaawase are prized as a gallery of late Heian calligraphic styles, the same milieu that produced celebrated decorated manuscripts of the age. The Volume 7 Fragment is one piece of that scattered whole, and it carries both the text of its contests and the brushwork of its anonymous scribe.

What to Look For in the Fragment

The contests named in this scroll cluster around two settings. Several took place in the household of an imperial princess, and several more at the salon of a retired imperial personage, recorded here as gatherings of "the In." The dated entries point to the Jiryaku era, the years 1065 to 1069, and two of them are pinned precisely to Kōshin nights in 1067 and 1068. The five-day-of-the-fifth-month entry suggests a contest tied to the seasonal Tango observance.

That clustering tells a small story about how poetry happened at court. A contest was not always a grand state occasion. It could be the entertainment that a princess or a retired sovereign arranged to carry a household through a sleepless ritual night, the participants composing on a theme while the incense burned down. Reading the headings, one can reconstruct the calendar of a particular literary circle across two or three years.

For the contests recorded only here, or in only a handful of sources, the scroll is close to irreplaceable. A poem that lost its round and never entered an imperial anthology can still survive in a compilation like this one, which copied winners and losers alike. Specialists read these records less for masterpieces than for the texture of a working poetic culture, the topics that were set, the way arguments were framed, the names of figures who otherwise vanish from the record.

Visually, the appeal lies in the brush. Late Heian scribes wrote a flowing, connected kana hand over paper that was often dyed or flecked with mica, and the rhythm of the line, the spacing, and the weight of the ink reveal the trained eye behind it. Because the larger work was written by many hands, comparing one section against another is a study in itself.

Seeing the Ruijū Utaawase and Its World

This particular fragment is in private keeping in Kyoto and is not on regular public view, so a traveler hoping to encounter the Ruijū Utaawase should plan around its relatives. The Tokyo National Museum holds several other sections of the same twenty-scroll compilation, among them pieces ranked as National Treasures, and these are shown periodically in the museum's rotations of premodern calligraphy. Many are also published through the museum's digital archives, where the brushwork can be examined page by page from anywhere.

In Kyoto itself, the Kyoto National Museum is the natural place to build context, with its strong holdings in Heian and Kamakura calligraphy and court culture. A visitor interested in the contests as living practice can also look to the surviving ceremony of poetry recitation, including the New Year poetry reading held each January, where the chanting style descends from the same court tradition that produced the utaawase.

Reading a translated selection of a famous contest before any visit pays off. Once you know how a round was argued and judged, the dense columns of a scroll like this one stop looking like an undifferentiated block of cursive and resolve into a record of real arguments about real poems.