Genryaku-Annual Edition of Manyoshu

The Genryaku Manuscript of the Man'yōshū

Bound into the twentieth volume of this set of twenty booklets is a short note that gives the whole manuscript its name. A court official, signing with his title and a stylized cipher, recorded that on the ninth day of the sixth month of Genryaku 1 (1184) he had finished checking the text against another copy. That single dated line of collation is why scholars call the work the Genryaku-kōhon, the "Genryaku collation manuscript," of the Man'yōshū. It is held today by the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno and was designated a National Treasure on June 9, 1951.

The Man'yōshū itself is the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry, assembled in the Nara period (eighth century) and traditionally associated with the courtier-poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi, who is thought to have shaped its later volumes. Across twenty books it gathers more than 4,500 poems, the majority of them short tanka, alongside long poems, dialogue verses, and other forms. What sets the collection apart from the courtly anthologies that followed is its range of voices: emperors and aristocrats appear beside provincial farmers and the frontier guards posted to Kyushu, whose parting songs are among the most quoted in the book.

None of this poetry was written in the script Japanese uses now. The Nara-period compilers spelled out Japanese sounds and words using Chinese characters borrowed for their phonetic value, a system later named man'yōgana after the anthology. Reading the Genryaku manuscript therefore means reading two layers at once: the older character spellings and the flowing kana that scribes added as the writing system matured.

Why it is a National Treasure

No copy of the Man'yōshū survives from the Nara period when it was compiled. Everything we have descends from later transcriptions, and the finest of these are the Heian-period manuscripts known collectively as the Five Great Man'yōshū: the Katsura, Aigami, Kanazawa, and Tenji manuscripts, and this one, the Genryaku. Among the five, the Genryaku manuscript carries the most poems, which makes it the closest thing to a complete early text of the anthology.

Its second distinction is in the brushwork. The manuscript is a yoriaigaki, a collaborative transcription divided among many hands. Specialists count somewhere around fifteen different calligraphers across the twenty volumes, each writing in a recognizable personal style. The first volume came down through the centuries with an attribution to Fujiwara no Yukinari, one of the three masters who perfected the Japanese style of calligraphy. The brush style, however, points to a date somewhat later than Yukinari's lifetime, and the hand in volume one is now linked instead to the scribe known from the third type of the Kōyagire, a famous set of poem fragments. The traditional name still clings to the volume, but the dating rests on the writing itself.

Designating the set in 1951 recognized both qualities at once: a text that records more of the eighth-century anthology than any rival, and a gallery of Heian calligraphic styles preserved page after page.

What to look for

The pages themselves are objects of craft. Each booklet measures roughly 25 by 17 centimeters and is written on torinoko, a smooth, durable paper made from gampi fiber. Suspended within the sheets are wisps of purple and indigo fiber called tobikumo, "flying clouds," that drift across the surface like weather seen from above. Faint ruled lines in pale ink guide the columns. Against this tinted ground the dark man'yōgana and kana stand out with unusual clarity, and the difference between one scribe's confident, evenly spaced lines and another's quicker rhythm becomes easy to see once you start looking for it.

One volume breaks the pattern. The sixth book is not Heian work on decorated paper but a Kamakura-period replacement, written in plain ink on plain paper roughly a century later. Comparing it with its neighbors shows how a treasured but incomplete set was repaired and kept whole over time.

The manuscript's later history is itself a story of dispersal and reassembly. It was once owned by Nakagawa Jōu of Matsusaka in Ise province, then passed to the Arisugawa-no-miya princely house. From there it split: six volumes went to the Takamatsunomiya family and are known as the Takamatsunomiya group, while fourteen volumes travelled through the Matsudaira lords of Kuwana and the senior shogunal councillor Mizuno Tadakuni to the Koga family, forming the Koga group. The two groups were eventually reunited in the national collection, which is why labels beside individual volumes still identify a given book as either "Koga" or "Takamatsunomiya."

Seeing the manuscript and visiting Ueno

Because the paper is fragile and light-sensitive, the Genryaku manuscript is not on permanent display. Volumes appear only occasionally in the Tokyo National Museum's rotating exhibitions of calligraphy and manuscripts, so anyone hoping to see an original should check the museum's current schedule before making a special trip. When the books are not out, the museum's high-resolution digital archive, e-Kokuhō (e国宝), lets you turn through every volume page by page and zoom in far enough to study individual brushstrokes, often a closer view than a display case allows.

The museum sits at the northern edge of Ueno Park, a short walk from Ueno Station. The park itself rewards a full day: the National Museum of Nature and Science, the National Museum of Western Art, Ueno Zoo, and the pond at Shinobazu are all within the grounds, and the temple complex of Kan'ei-ji and the Tōshō-gū shrine lie nearby. Cherry blossoms draw large crowds along the central avenue in early spring, while autumn is quieter and better for museum-going.