Kokin Wakashu (Sairaki) (Motonaga Book)

A Poetry Book Dated to the Year 1120

Most masterpieces of early Japanese calligraphy reach us without a name or a date. This one carries a date. At the close of the upper volume, in the same hand as the poems, a short note records Gen'ei 3, the seventh month, the twenty-fourth day, which falls in the year 1120. That single line gives the book its common name, the Gen'ei-bon, or Gen'ei manuscript, and makes it one of the few fixed points by which scholars judge the age of other, undated Heian writing.

The book is a copy of the Kokin Wakashū, the first anthology of Japanese verse assembled by imperial command. Emperor Daigo set the project in motion in 905, and the finished collection ran to more than a thousand waka arranged behind a kana preface and across twenty books. More than thirty Heian-period copies survive, yet this is the only one in which the preface and all twenty books remain whole. It takes the form of two bound volumes, sewn in the gathered-quire style (tetchōsō) used for fine books of the age, and it keeps close to its original shape.

This was never a scholar's working text. It was produced as a chōdo tehon, a presentation volume made for exchange among the court aristocracy and meant to be looked at as much as read.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The manuscript was designated a National Treasure on 9 June 1951. Its standing rests on several things at once. As a text, it is the earliest complete witness to the Kokin Wakashū, the collection that shaped the vocabulary and conventions of court poetry for centuries afterward. As a dated object, it anchors the study of Heian calligraphy, since so little kana writing of the period records when it was made. And as calligraphy in its own right, it belongs to the high point of the kana hand.

The question of who wrote it is more open than the polished result suggests. By tradition the brush was assigned to the poet Minamoto no Toshiyori. On the evidence of style, however, most specialists now favor Fujiwara no Sadazane, a calligrapher active in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Sadazane descended from Fujiwara no Yukinari, also called Kōzei, one of the three masters whose work defined the native wayō manner of writing. The attribution is offered as a strong likelihood rather than a settled fact, and the basic information below records both names.

Reading the Paper as Closely as the Poems

The first thing to study is not the writing but the surface beneath it. Each leaf is a sheet of Japanese-made karakami, decorated paper worked in the continental manner. The grounds are dyed in purple, red, green, yellow, brown and white. Over the color, stencil patterns drawn from Chinese design, among them scrolling arabesque (karakusa), linked circles (shippō), diamonds and tortoiseshell hexagons, were printed in mica so that they stay nearly invisible until the light strikes them at an angle and they surface with a faint shine.

The decoration does not stop there. Cut foil of gold and silver (kirihaku), scattered foil dust (sunago) and fine foil threads were strewn across the sheets, and the reverse sides were treated the same way. The poems sit on top of all this. The scribe set down each one in two or three lines, at times breaking into the dispersed arrangement called chirashi-gaki, slipping a few Chinese characters into the flowing kana and thickening or thinning the brush to answer the pattern underneath. Paper and writing were composed together, as a single design.

Seen up close, the effect is quiet rather than loud. The gold reveals itself slowly, the colors are softened by an undercoat of dissolved shell powder, and the eye is drawn along the run of the verse rather than stopped by ornament.

Seeing It in Ueno

The book belongs to the Tokyo National Museum, in Ueno Park. Like all ink-on-paper works of its age, it is sensitive to light and is not on permanent view. It appears in rotation, frequently in the weeks around the New Year, with one of the two volumes shown at a time and the open pages changed partway through a display run. Checking the museum's exhibition schedule before a visit is the only reliable way to confirm that it is on view.

When the manuscript is back in storage, the Honkan, the museum's main Japanese gallery, keeps a changing selection of calligraphy and other Heian material on view, and the wider grounds reward an unhurried afternoon. Ueno Park gathers several of the city's leading collections within a short walk, so a trip planned around this one book rarely goes to waste even when the book itself is resting.