Kokinshu (Authorized to Have Been Written by Fujiwara No

A National Treasure Manuscript of the Kokin Wakashū

Designated a National Treasure on 22 November 1952, this copy of the Kokin Wakashū survives as two slim booklets (jō) brushed during the Heian period, in the twelfth century. It belongs to the Maeda Ikutokukai, the foundation that holds the old library and art collection of the Maeda lords of the Kaga domain, and is kept at the foundation's Sonkeikaku Bunko in Tokyo.

By tradition the calligraphy is the work of Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104-1177), a poet and textual scholar who spent much of his career studying this very anthology. For that reason the official designation records the manuscript as "attributed to the brush of Fujiwara no Kiyosuke" rather than as a securely signed work. The qualifier matters, and the section below explains why.

What the two booklets contain is the foundational anthology of classical Japanese verse. To understand the manuscript, it helps to begin with the text it carries.

The Anthology Behind the Manuscript

The Kokin Wakashū, or "Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New," was the first waka anthology compiled by imperial command. Emperor Daigo ordered the project around 905, and four poets carried it out: Ki no Tsurayuki, Ki no Tomonori, Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine. Tsurayuki led the work and wrote its famous preface in Japanese kana, the first piece of literary criticism composed in the native script. A second preface, in literary Chinese, accompanies it.

Arranged across twenty books, the collection groups roughly eleven hundred poems by theme, opening with the four seasons and moving through love, travel, grief, and miscellaneous verse. This thematic ordering, rather than a simple chronological list, became the template that every later imperial anthology followed. The Kokinshū stands at the head of the eight great anthologies of the classical age, and its arrival helped establish the courtly culture that prized poetry in Japanese over composition in Chinese.

For a reader holding the Maeda booklets, then, the words on the page are not a private keepsake. They are the source from which centuries of Japanese poetic taste flowed.

Kiyosuke and the Question of the Attribution

Fujiwara no Kiyosuke came from the Rokujō branch of the Fujiwara family, a house that built its reputation on the scholarly study of poetry. His father, Fujiwara no Akisuke, had compiled an imperial anthology of his own, and Kiyosuke inherited both the family library and its obsession with getting old texts right. He produced influential treatises on poetic practice and edited collections of verse, and his commentaries lean heavily on the Kokinshū for their examples. In the rivalry that defined late Heian poetics, Kiyosuke spoke for the Rokujō school against the Mikohidari house of Fujiwara no Shunzei.

A scholar so closely identified with the Kokinshū was a natural name to attach to a fine old manuscript of it. Later owners and connoisseurs did exactly that. Modern textual scholars, however, read the manuscript's colophon and grew cautious. The copy is generally understood to descend from an exemplar written in the mid-twelfth century, transmitted through later transcription, and the wording of its endnote does not support a confident claim that Kiyosuke himself held the brush. No manuscript has yet been confirmed as his certain autograph.

This is why the careful phrasing is worth keeping. The booklets belong to the recognized "Kiyosuke text" lineage of the Kokinshū, a line of transmission tied to his scholarship, and the attribution preserves a real historical connection even where it overstates the literal authorship.

Why It Was Named a National Treasure

The value of an old poetry manuscript lies less in beauty alone than in what it can prove. Because the original Kokinshū of around 905 does not survive, every reading we have of Tsurayuki's anthology depends on copies made generations later, and those copies disagree with one another in wording, in the order of poems, and in which verses they include. Scholars reconstruct the text by comparing these witnesses, and an early, carefully transmitted copy like the Maeda booklets carries unusual evidential weight.

The manuscript is old as such copies go, and it preserves the Kiyosuke line of the text, one of the major recensions that scholars set against the better known lineages when they edit the anthology. Its calligraphy, in the flowing kana hand of the Heian court, also belongs to the history of Japanese writing as an art. The 1952 designation recognized this combination of textual authority and aesthetic refinement, placing the work among the nineteen National Treasures held in the Sonkeikaku collection.

Seeing the Work, and What Lies Nearby

A caution for travelers: the Sonkeikaku Bunko in the Komaba district of Tokyo is a private research library, not a museum, and the manuscript is not on general public view. Fragile twelfth-century paper of this rank appears in public only rarely, in special exhibitions arranged with major museums. Researchers may consult the collection by application under set conditions, but a casual visitor cannot walk in and ask to see the booklets.

The more rewarding route runs through Kanazawa, the old castle town of the Maeda lords in Ishikawa Prefecture. The Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art has long housed a branch of the Sonkeikaku Bunko and shows selections from the family's holdings, so it is the best place to encounter Maeda treasures in rotation; check the museum's current schedule before you go, since displays change and a given manuscript may not be out. Kanazawa itself rewards the trip, with the Kenrokuen garden and the surviving quarters of the castle a short walk apart.

If your interest is the poems themselves, faithful facsimiles of Sonkeikaku manuscripts were published over decades in a scholarly reprint series, and good annotated editions of the Kokin Wakashū are widely available in print and translation. The verses are meant to be read, and that pleasure needs no appointment.