The Remaining Volume of the Twelfth Volume of the Kokin

A Thousand-Year-Old Love Poem, Written in Drifting Kana

The brushstrokes are small and rounded, and they do not march down the page so much as scatter across it, bunching into clusters and then thinning to a single trailing line. They were written more than eight centuries ago, in the cursive Japanese syllabary called kana, on sheets of imported Chinese paper where a pattern of oleander blossoms was printed in powdered mica that still glints when the light shifts.

This is the twelfth book of the Kokin Wakashū, the section of love poems, surviving as a single handscroll in the Kyoto National Museum. It carries the nickname Hon'ami-gire, and among Japanese collectors of old calligraphy it has long held a reputation as the finest fragment of its kind.

The Anthology Behind the Fragment

To understand why a length of paper attracts this kind of devotion, it helps to know what is written on it. The Kokin Wakashū, or "Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern," was assembled around the year 905 at the command of Emperor Daigo. It was the first poetry anthology commissioned by an emperor, compiled by the poet Ki no Tsurayuki together with three colleagues, and it set the rules of taste for Japanese court verse for centuries afterward. Its twenty books are arranged by theme, and Book Twelve gathers a second sequence of love poems, tracing the arc of an affair from first longing to its cooling and end.

The poems were old by the time this scroll was brushed. What makes the object a national treasure is not the text, which survives in many copies, but the hand that wrote it and the paper it was written on.

A word on the name. In Japanese, gire means a "cutting." Old anthologies that once existed as scrolls or bound booklets were later taken apart, and individual passages were remounted as hanging scrolls so they could be displayed and admired one at a time, often in the alcove of a tea room. Fragments of this particular manuscript came into the hands of Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), a celebrated calligrapher and artist of the early Edo period, and his ownership gave the whole group its name.

Why It Was Named a National Treasure

The scroll was designated a National Treasure on June 15, 1967, in the category of calligraphy and classical texts. Several things set it apart.

The first is the calligraphy. For generations the brushwork was attributed to Ono no Tōfū (894–966), one of the three great calligraphers of the Heian court. Modern specialists doubt this. The rounded letterforms and the decorated paper point instead to the late eleventh or early twelfth century, the era of cloistered rule, roughly two hundred years after Tōfū's death. The attribution is best read as an old tradition rather than a fact, but it tells you how highly the writing was regarded: only the greatest of names seemed to fit it.

The second is the paper. The eight sheets joined to form the scroll are karakami, decorated paper imported from China and treasured by the Heian aristocracy. Over a prepared ground, an oleander design was stamped in mica, a technique called kirazuri that leaves a faint shimmer rather than a solid color. Writing surface and brushwork were meant to be read together, the restraint of the silvery pattern setting off the ink.

The third is survival. Most pieces of the Hon'ami-gire exist today as small fragments of around ten lines, their white ground flaked away until the characters are hard to make out. This scroll preserves eight full sheets and some 132 lines, opening with roughly the first forty-eight poems of Book Twelve, and its condition is unusually good. The original manuscript would have run to all twenty books plus the preface; only scattered portions remain, divided among several collections, and this volume is the most complete and best preserved of them. Connoisseurs of the tea ceremony once ranked it first among all famous fragments, and it is spoken of in the same breath as the Kōya-gire, the other supreme example of early Kokin Wakashū calligraphy.

What to Look For

Spend time with the spacing before the individual letters. Heian kana calligraphy is an art of arrangement as much as of the brush, and here the writer leaves wide margins and lets lines of different lengths fall unevenly down the sheet, a manner called chirashi-gaki, or "scattered writing." Characters link one into the next in unbroken runs, then break apart, so that the page reads almost like a piece of music with its own pauses and quickenings.

Because paper and ink are fragile, the scroll is not on permanent view. The Kyoto National Museum rotates its calligraphy holdings through the galleries of the Heisei Chishinkan wing and shows them in occasional special exhibitions, always under low light to protect them. If a visit does not coincide with a showing, the museum's online collection and the national e-Museum database both offer high-resolution images that let you trace the brushwork closely, which is often easier than reading the faint original through gallery glass.

Around the Museum

The Kyoto National Museum sits in the Higashiyama district in the southeast of the city, and a single street is all that separates it from another National Treasure. Directly across Shichijō-dōri stands Sanjūsangen-dō, the long thirteenth-century hall that houses one thousand and one gilded statues of the thousand-armed Kannon, a sight worth at least an hour on its own.

The museum grounds themselves reward a slow walk: a brick exhibition hall of 1895, now itself a designated property, and gardens dotted with stone Buddhas and a cast of Rodin's The Thinker near the fountain. Toyokuni Shrine and the great Hōkō-ji bell lie a short distance north, and the lanes climbing toward Kiyomizu-dera begin not far beyond.

Getting here is straightforward. From Kyoto Station, city buses 100, 206, and 208 stop at "Hakubutsukan Sanjūsangendō-mae," right by the gate. By train, Keihan Shichijō Station is about a seven-minute walk to the west.