Preface to Kokin Wakashu (33 Colored Plates)

The Kokin Wakashū Preface on Thirty-Three Decorated Sheets

Thirty-three sheets of Chinese-style paper, each dyed a different shade and stamped with mica and wax-pressed designs, were pasted end to end to form a single handscroll. Across this run of color a Heian scribe brushed the opening words of Japanese poetry's most famous manifesto: that song takes root in the human heart and grows into countless leaves of words. The scroll is the kana preface to the Kokin Wakashū, and it survives at the Okura Shukokan in Tokyo as a National Treasure.

The text itself is older than the manuscript. Around 905, Emperor Daigo ordered the compilation of the first imperially sponsored anthology of waka poetry, and one of its editors, the poet Ki no Tsurayuki, composed a preface in Japanese kana to stand alongside a second preface written in Chinese. Tsurayuki's preface is read not only as an introduction but as an early work of poetic theory, an argument for what waka is and why it matters.

The object at the Okura Shukokan is a copy made roughly two centuries later, in the late Heian period. It once belonged to a complete set known as the scroll-format Kokin Wakashū: the twenty volumes of poems plus this one preface. Of that set, only the preface comes down to us intact. The twenty volumes of verse have been broken up over the centuries and survive as scattered fragments, some framed, some pasted into calligraphy albums, held in collections across Japan.

Whose hand brushed it

The calligrapher's identity is unsettled. For generations the scroll was passed down as the work of Minamoto no Toshiyori, a leading poet of the day. Modern study of the brushwork has shifted the balance toward a different name: Fujiwara no Sadazane, whose attribution most specialists now favor on the basis of style.

Sadazane carried a notable lineage. He was a great-grandson of Fujiwara no Yukinari, counted among the sanseki, the three calligraphers regarded as having perfected the native Japanese brush style, and he stood fourth in the line of the Sesonji school that descended from Yukinari. Reading the attribution this way places the scroll within a recognized family tradition of court calligraphy. The label remains a scholarly judgment rather than a documented fact, and it is best treated as an attribution open to revision.

Why it is a National Treasure

The scroll was designated a National Treasure on June 9, 1951. Its value rests on two things meeting in one object: an important text and an exceptional surface to carry it.

As a text, this is the surviving complete portion of an early scroll-format Kokin Wakashū, and the anthology is foundational to the Japanese literary tradition. As a physical artifact, the manuscript belongs to the high point of Heian decorated-paper craft. The thirty-three sheets are karakami, a Chinese-style paper whose techniques arrived from Song-dynasty China, where bamboo paper was coated and printed with patterned designs using mica or blind wax-pressing. Japanese aristocrats prized the imported sheets for their unusual motifs, and workshops produced their own. On this scroll the patterns include plants and human figures, and because each sheet is colored and decorated differently, the eye travels through shifting grounds as the scroll opens.

The writing answers the paper. The kana are brushed in a flowing cursive, the script adapting to the decoration beneath it. This pairing of refined paper and assured hand is why the scroll is ranked among the representative masterpieces of kohitsu, the classical brush-written manuscripts that connoisseurs collect and study.

What to look for

This is a work to read slowly with the eyes. Follow the color first. Watch how one dyed sheet gives way to the next and how the printed motifs surface and recede under the kana. Look for where the brush thins and thickens; the writer varied the weight of the strokes in response to the ground, so the calligraphy and the paper are not two layers but one design.

One practical point shapes any visit. The scroll is long, and conservators do not unroll it all at once. When it appears, often only a section is shown, and an exhibition may change which part is visible partway through its run. Seeing the opening lines and seeing the closing passage can mean two separate trips.

The opening is the part most visitors hope to find. Tsurayuki begins with the image that has defined Japanese poetics ever since: the human heart as a seed, the words of poetry as the leaves that grow from it. To stand in front of those first lines, brushed onto colored Heian paper, is to see a famous idea in its early handwritten form rather than in print.

Around the museum

The scroll is kept at the Okura Shukokan in Toranomon, central Tokyo, on the grounds of The Okura Tokyo hotel. The museum opened in 1917, founded by the businessman Okura Kihachiro to house the art and rare books he had gathered, and it is regarded as Japan's first private art museum. This particular scroll entered the collection through his son, Okura Kishichiro.

Because the preface is shown only occasionally, plan around the museum's own holdings rather than around this one object. The Okura Shukokan keeps two other National Treasures, a Heian-period seated figure of the bodhisattva Samantabhadra on an elephant and the Kamakura-period Zuijin Teiki Emaki picture scroll, along with screens, ceramics, and East Asian antiquities. The collection rewards a visit even in months when the preface itself is not on view.

If you are following the decorated-paper tradition specifically, the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno holds a closely related National Treasure, the Genei-bon Kokin Wakashū of 1120, a complete copy on similarly lavish colored paper. The two manuscripts illuminate each other, and the Genei-bon is shown more regularly. Toranomon and Ueno are an easy ride apart on the Tokyo subway, which makes pairing them straightforward.