Kokin Wakashu Volume 8 (Koyagiri Version)

A Heian Scroll That Set the Standard for Japanese Calligraphy

Only three volumes of the oldest surviving copy of the Kokin Wakashū still exist as complete handscrolls. One of them is the eighth volume, kept for generations by the Mōri family and now held at the Mōri Museum in Hōfu, on the Inland Sea coast of Yamaguchi.

The Kokin Wakashū was the first anthology of Japanese poetry ever commissioned by the imperial court. Compiled by order of Emperor Daigo around the year 905, it gathered some 1,100 waka verses and fixed the taste of court poetry for the next several centuries. Ki no Tsurayuki, the courtier who led the project, also wrote its celebrated preface in kana, an early argument for poetry written in the Japanese vernacular rather than in Chinese.

This scroll is not the original from Tsurayuki's lifetime. It was brushed in the middle of the eleventh century, roughly 150 years after the anthology was assembled. That still makes it the earliest known manuscript of the collection to survive, which is why every later copy is measured against it.

Where the Name Comes From

The word Kōyagire means, literally, "the Kōya cutting." Its origin is specific. In the late sixteenth century Toyotomi Hideyoshi gave part of the ninth volume of this manuscript to a monk at Monju-in, a temple on Mount Kōya, the great monastic complex south of Osaka. That fragment stayed on the mountain for generations, and the name eventually spread to the whole related group of volumes and detached pieces.

By that period the practice of cutting old masterworks of calligraphy into sections, mounting them, and collecting them as kogire, or "old cuttings," was well established among connoisseurs. Several volumes of the Kokin Wakashū manuscript met that fate. The eighth volume did not. It came down intact, column by column, as a single continuous roll.

Three Hands, One Anthology

For a long time the calligraphy was credited to Ki no Tsurayuki himself, in part because he had edited the anthology and was remembered as a fine brush master. Close study has changed that picture. The writing across the manuscript divides into three clearly different styles, the work of three calligraphers who split the twenty volumes among themselves. Scholars call this kind of shared project a yoriaigaki, a collaborative copying, and label the three styles simply the first, second, and third hands.

Volume eight is the work of the second hand. The prevailing scholarly view identifies this calligrapher as Minamoto no Kaneyuki, a court official and respected writer active in the mid-eleventh century. The identification draws on a colored-paper inscription long associated with him at the Phoenix Hall of Byōdō-in and on a surviving letter in his own hand whose style matches the second group.

The scroll was designated a National Treasure on June 9, 1951. Its standing is straightforward to explain. Among all the copies of the Kokin Wakashū it is the oldest, and of the manuscript's twenty original volumes only three have reached us whole rather than as cut fragments. Volume eight is one of those three.

What to Look For in the Brushwork

The reason calligraphers travel to see this scroll is the kana. The text uses very few Chinese characters, resting almost entirely on the flowing hiragana that had matured into a high art by the Heian period. Characters link one into the next in unbroken strokes, a technique known as renmen, in which the brush seldom leaves the paper. Of the three hands the second is the most assertive, with a firm and individual rhythm rather than the soft restraint of the first.

Reading the scroll is a little like watching a brush in motion. The spacing of the columns, the weight that swells and thins within a single line, the moment one poem releases into the next: all of it was set down in a single sustained act that later writers have studied without surpassing. A visitor does not need to read classical Japanese to feel the confidence in it.

Around the Museum

The Mōri Museum occupies part of the former main residence of the Mōri family, the lords of the Chōshū domain who were raised to the rank of duke after 1868. The house was completed in 1916 and is itself an Important Cultural Property. It stands inside the Mōri Garden, a strolling garden of roughly 84,000 square meters laid out around a central pond and designated a National Place of Scenic Beauty. Cherry blossoms in spring, azaleas in early summer, and maples in late November each give the grounds a different character.

The family collection numbers about twenty thousand objects, and the museum changes its displays every couple of months. Other National Treasures here include a landscape painting by the master Sesshū and an early sword. The Kōyagire scroll is fragile and sensitive to light, so it appears only on occasion, often during the special National Treasure exhibition held around the autumn foliage in mid to late November. Anyone hoping to see the scroll itself should check the current exhibition before making the trip. Photography is not allowed inside the museum.

Hōfu sits on the JR Sanyō Line, and the museum is about an eight-minute taxi ride from Hōfu Station, or roughly 2.5 kilometers from the Hōfu-Higashi interchange on the Sanyō Expressway. The garden and the museum charge separate admission, with a combined ticket sold at the entrance. Even when the scroll is in storage, the house and garden reward a slow afternoon.