Poetry Contest

A Poetry Contest That Never Happened

On nine sheets of paper clouded with drifting bands of purple and indigo, thirty of the most admired poets in Japanese history are set against one another, round by round, as if competing in a tournament none of them ever attended. This is the Kasen Utaawase, a single handscroll from the eleventh century and one of the supreme surviving examples of Japanese kana writing.

An utaawase was a literary game of the Heian court. Two sides composed waka poems on an assigned topic, an arbiter paired them off and declared a winner for each round, and the whole affair was recorded for posterity. The scroll in Izumi borrows that competitive shape but is something quieter: a curated anthology in which celebrated poets, many long dead by the time it was made, are matched across fifteen rounds. The poems sit in two registers, upper and lower, so that each pair of poets faces off down the length of the paper.

The original carried no title, and its first name is lost. "Kasen Utaawase," meaning roughly a poetry match of the immortal poets, is a label attached by later hands. The scroll is owned by the city of Izumi in Osaka Prefecture and kept at the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The scroll was designated a National Treasure on 29 March 1952, in the category of calligraphy and classical texts. Its value rests on two things at once: what it preserves and how it is written.

It preserves 130 poems by thirty poets, a roll call of the figures revered in later centuries as kasen, or poetic immortals. The selection is thought to reflect the taste of Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041), the scholar and aesthete who compiled the bilingual anthology Wakan Rōeishū and whose lists helped fix the canon of model poets for generations. The attribution is reasoned rather than proven, and is best read as a strong tradition.

The writing itself has long been credited to Fujiwara no Yukinari, also known as Kōzei (972–1027), one of the three calligraphers remembered as the Sanseki, the "Three Brush Traces" of the mid-Heian age, and the founder of the Sesonji line of calligraphers. That name comes down as a traditional attribution; the hand may be his or a close contemporary's. What is beyond dispute is the quality. The brushwork dates from the period when kana, the flowing cursive syllabary developed for writing Japanese, had reached full maturity, and it shows the assurance of a writer working at the height of that idiom.

What to Look For

Begin with the paper. The nine sheets are decorated in a technique called tobikumo, "flying clouds," made by working dyed fibers of purple and indigo into the sheet as it forms. The clouds here are unusually large and loosely massed, their color shifting where the fibers thin out or overlap, so the ground seems to move beneath the writing.

Then the brush. Each poem is laid out in three lines, and the column spacing tightens because there is a great deal to fit. Yet the characters stay upright and well formed, and the writer lets the ink run from saturated black to dry grey as the brush empties between dips. That rhythm of reloading gives the surface a tidal swell, a sense of movement across an otherwise even page.

The roster rewards a slow read. The opening round pairs Kakinomoto no Hitomaro and Ki no Tsurayuki, two of the most towering names in the tradition, and the closing round pairs Taira no Kanemori and the woman poet Nakatsukasa. These first and last bouts each carry ten poems, the places of honor, while the rounds in between usually hold two or three. Ono no Komachi, famed for her poems of longing, appears in the eleventh round. Reading down the scroll, you are moving through roughly three centuries of poets gathered into a single imagined room.

One practical note shapes any visit: an object this fragile is shown only on occasion, usually during the museum's spring special exhibitions. It is not on permanent view.

Around the Museum

The Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts opened in 1982 around a founding gift of East Asian art from the Kubo family and the Kuboso textile firm. The Kasen Utaawase is one of its two National Treasures; the other is a Southern Song celadon vase known as "Bansei," prized for the soft blue-green of its glaze. The collection also holds Important Cultural Properties such as the Kamakura-period Tales of Ise picture scroll and a stark ink painting of a shrike on a withered branch by the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, alongside a few surprises, including a Monet water-lily canvas and a cast of Rodin's The Thinker.

The museum sits in the hills of Izumi, south of central Osaka. The simplest approach is to take the Nankai Semboku Line to Izumi-Chūō Station and transfer to a Nankai bus bound for the museum stop, Bijutsukan-mae. Travelers coming on the JR Hanwa Line can change to a bus at Izumi-Fuchū, and drivers reach it in a few minutes from the Kishiwada-Izumi interchange on the Hanwa Expressway, where there is free parking. After a visit, the wooded grounds and the quiet residential edge of the city make for an easy walk.