Kokinshu Volume 19 (Koya-Giri)

The Oldest Surviving Copy of Japan's First Imperial Poetry Anthology

Around the year 905, Emperor Daigo ordered four court poets, led by Ki no Tsurayuki, to gather the finest Japanese verse of their age into a single collection. The result was the Kokin Wakashū, the first poetry anthology ever commissioned by an emperor and the model that every later imperial collection would follow. Tsurayuki's own presentation manuscript was lost to fire by the twelfth century. What survives today as the earliest witness to the text is a set of scrolls known as the Kōya-gire, and one of its most important pieces is the fragment of Volume 19 held by the Maeda Ikutoku Kai in Tokyo.

The word gire, meaning "cut piece," signals what happened to the manuscript over the centuries. Originally a set of twenty handscrolls, it was eventually taken apart, with individual sheets and sections passing through different hands. The whole work takes its nickname from one episode in that history: Toyotomi Hideyoshi presented the opening section of Volume 9 to Mokujiki Ōgo, an influential monk of Mount Kōya, and as that portion became known, the rest of the surviving scrolls came to share the name.

The Volume 19 scroll in the Maeda collection is a substantial remaining portion rather than a small clipping, which is why it carries the name zankan, an incomplete but continuous length of the original roll. It preserves part of the section the anthology calls zattai, or poems in irregular forms: long poems, head-repeated sedōka, and the lighter haikai verses that sit slightly outside the conventions of court waka.

Three Hands Behind One Manuscript

For most of its history the Kōya-gire was attributed to Ki no Tsurayuki himself, the very poet who had compiled the anthology. Close study of the brushwork in the modern era told a different story. The writing across the surviving scrolls falls into three distinct styles, and scholars now agree the manuscript was a collaborative effort, copied by three skilled calligraphers working in concert. The convention is to call them simply the First, Second, and Third hands.

This kind of shared production, where several writers divide a long text among themselves, was a recognized practice in Heian court circles. The three hands are not the work of Tsurayuki, who had died around 946. The copy was made roughly a century later, in the middle of the eleventh century. One of the three calligraphers, the Second hand, has been identified with reasonable confidence as Minamoto no Kaneyuki, who lived from 1023 to 1074, which helps anchor the whole project to that period. The identities of the other two remain a matter of careful argument rather than settled fact.

Volume 19 belongs to the Third hand. Only two scrolls in this style survive, Volume 18 and Volume 19, so the Maeda fragment is one of a very small group. Of the three, the Third hand is often the one teachers recommend to beginners, because its characters are clearly formed and easy to read while still flowing naturally from one to the next.

Why It Was Named a National Treasure

The fragment was designated a National Treasure on February 2, 1955, in the category of calligraphy and classical texts. Its value rests on two foundations that reinforce each other. As a document, it is the closest surviving link to a lost masterpiece of Japanese literature, allowing scholars to study the wording and arrangement of the Kokin Wakashū as it stood only a few generations after its compilation. As calligraphy, it represents kana writing at a moment when the script had reached a confident maturity.

Kana are the phonetic syllables that the Japanese developed from simplified Chinese characters, the writing system that made it possible to record the sound and rhythm of native poetry directly. The forms of hiragana in everyday use today are thought to descend from the models seen in the Kōya-gire. To stand before this writing is to look at one of the points where the modern Japanese script took the shape it still keeps.

The Third hand has a character of its own within that achievement. Where the First hand is restrained and stately, the Third is brighter and more youthful. The brush lines are crisp and decisive, the ink laid down generously, and the connected runs of characters move with an unhurried, even tempo. Critics have long praised this style as among the most natural and graceful in all of classical kana.

What to Look for in the Writing

Because Volume 19 contains poems in irregular forms, including long poems that run far beyond the standard thirty-one syllables, the calligrapher had room to develop sustained passages of connected script. Watching how the brush links character to character down a single line, then resets with a fresh load of ink, reveals the rhythm that gives this hand its reputation for lightness. The spacing is generous and the pressure varies in a controlled way, so that thick and thin strokes alternate without ever looking forced.

The paper itself was prepared with care, often dyed and decorated for a work of this status, and the layout of poem, headnote, and attribution follows the orderly arrangement that defines the Third hand. Even a viewer who cannot read the old kana can follow the visual music of the page: the long vertical lines, the moments where the brush slows and gathers, the clean release at the end of a phrase. This is calligraphy meant to be experienced as design as much as text.

Where to Encounter the Kōya-gire

The Volume 19 scroll is held by the Maeda Ikutoku Kai, the foundation that preserves the cultural treasures of the former Kaga domain's Maeda family, through its Sonkeikaku Bunko archive in the Komaba district of Tokyo. The Sonkeikaku Bunko is principally a research library and storehouse rather than a public gallery, so the scroll is not on permanent display. Pieces from the collection do appear from time to time in special exhibitions, and checking museum announcements is the most reliable way to learn when it may be shown.

Travelers who want to see Kōya-gire calligraphy in person have other options. The Kōchi Castle Museum of History holds the complete Volume 20, written in the First hand, the only volume of the entire manuscript to survive intact. Individual sheets in the First hand are kept by museums in and around Tokyo, including the Gotoh Museum, the Mitsui Memorial Museum, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts, and these institutions rotate their holdings of classical calligraphy into view across the year. Any of these encounters offers a way into the same world of eleventh-century kana that the Maeda scroll represents.