The Tale of Ise (written by Kyono Tsubone of the Department

A Leaner Tales of Ise, Kept in Sakata

At the Honma Museum of Art in the port town of Sakata, a single bound volume holds a version of the Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari) shorter than any other that has come down to us. It carries 115 episodes and 198 poems, written ten lines to a page on unruled gampi paper, and it has been an Important Cultural Property since 1977.

The Tales of Ise is one of the cornerstones of Japanese literature: a loosely linked sequence of short episodes, each built around one or more waka poems, that follows an unnamed man from his coming-of-age into old age. Its author and date of completion are unknown. So many of the poems belong to the ninth-century courtier and poet Ariwara no Narihira that readers have long taken him to be the man at the center of the book. The work survives only through later hand-copied manuscripts, and those copies do not all agree. Over the centuries the text split into distinct lineages that differ in how many episodes they contain and in how those episodes are ordered, joined, or divided.

The Sakata volume belongs to the most pared-down of these lineages, known as the Nurigome-bon. A note at the end records that the parent text once sat in the nurigome, a sealed storeroom for documents, at the Suzakuin palace in the old capital of Heian-kyo. Because that copy is said to have belonged to the mid-Heian aristocrat Takashina no Naritada, ranked at the second court grade and so nicknamed Konii, the lineage also goes by the name Konii-bon.

Why a Shorter Copy Matters

It can seem strange that a manuscript with fewer episodes than its rivals should be prized, but that is the point. By the Kamakura period the poet Fujiwara no Teika had produced an edited text of the Tales of Ise that became the standard, widely circulated version. The Sakata volume sits outside that mainstream. Its order of episodes, its combinations and splits, and its choice of which sections to keep all diverge from Teika's, and specialists read those differences as marks of an older form of the text, closer to how the work may have looked before later editing smoothed it out.

The volume is attributed to a court lady called Minbukyo no Tsubone, named in a colophon added in the winter of 1664 by Reizei Tamekiyo, a member of the Reizei poetic house. That colophon identifies her as a daughter of Fujiwara no Teika. The attribution is traditional rather than proven, and the national cultural-property record treats the writing as the work of an unknown hand from roughly the same era. What is clear is that the copy is old, careful, and rare. Of the copies that carry this Konii line of text, only a handful are known, among them this volume and two held by the National Institute of Japanese Literature.

Looking Closely

This is a book to read with the eyes of someone who handles old paper. The binding is tetsuyoso, a method in which sheets are folded, gathered into quires, and sewn through the fold, the same structure favored for poetry collections and tales. The paper is gampi, prized for a smooth, faintly translucent surface, and it carries no ruled lines, so the ten columns of script run free across each half-page.

Two later layers of marking reward a slow look. Earlier readers checked the text against other copies and left collation notes in ink. Later still, someone added annotations in red, numbering the episodes and noting which poetry anthologies the verses came from. Together these traces turn the volume into a record of how scholars studied and argued over the text long after it was first copied.

Because manuscripts on gampi paper are sensitive to light, the volume is not on permanent view. It appears in the museum's rotating special exhibitions from time to time, so anyone hoping to see the original should check the current program before traveling. When it is not on display, the museum itself rewards the visit on its own terms.

Around the Museum

The Honma Museum of Art opened in 1947 as the first private museum founded in postwar Japan, established by the Honma family, the Sakata merchant house that grew into one of the country's largest landholders. Its collection ranges across painting, calligraphy, ceramics, arms, and tea utensils, much of it received from the lords of the Sakai and Uesugi domains.

The grounds are as much the attraction as the galleries. Seien-kaku, a refined Kyoto-style wooden villa built in 1813, once served as a guesthouse for visiting dignitaries and even hosted the future Emperor Showa. Beside it spreads Kakubu-en, a stroll garden built around a pond and laid out to borrow distant Mount Chokai as part of its view. The garden was created partly as winter work relief for the harbor laborers of the port. From the museum it is a short walk to the Sankyo Storehouses, the rice warehouses lined with old zelkova trees that have become the emblem of Sakata.