Passage from “A Modern-Day Wen Xuan: Selections of Refined Literature” after 1705 Morikawa Kyoriku (Kyoroku) ???? This hanging scroll records reflections on Japanese poetry by Morikawa Kyoriku, a samurai of the Hikone clan who was also a noted poet of haikai (seventeen-syllable verse) in the style of Matsu Bash?, and recognized as one of the master’s ten top pupils. The celebrated poet-calligrapher brushed seven columns of highly cursive, somewhat idiosyncratic, but eminently legible characters—mostly kana (Japanese phonetic writing) with an admixture of kanji (Chinese characters) that punctua

Passage from “A Modern-Day Wen Xuan: Selections of Refined Literature” after 1705 Morikawa Kyoriku (Kyoroku) ???? This hanging scroll records reflections on Japanese poetry by Morikawa Kyoriku, a samurai of the Hikone clan who was also a noted poet of haikai (seventeen-syllable verse) in the style of Matsu Bash?, and recognized as one of the master’s ten top pupils. The celebrated poet-calligrapher brushed seven columns of highly cursive, somewhat idiosyncratic, but eminently legible characters—mostly kana (Japanese phonetic writing) with an admixture of kanji (Chinese characters) that punctuate the composition with slightly denser forms. For instance, at the bottom of the second column from the right, we see the characters waka no michi ????, or the “way of Japanese poetry,” are melded into a column of mostly kana. And as we scan the text elsewhere for easily recognizable phrases, we realize that this is a prose commentary not on haikai, as we would expect, but on waka (courtly verse in thirty-one syllables) and the status of Japanese poetry in general. Reading a few more phrases, we can see that the entire passage seems to riff off famous statements about waka included in the “Kana Preface” of the first imperially commissioned waka anthology, The Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Kokin wakash?, 905). In places it quotes verbatim from the “Kana Preface,” especially the famous phrase, “It is song that moves heaven and earth without effort, stirs emotions in the invisible spirits and gods, brings harmony to the relations between men and women, and calms the hearts of fierce warriors.” (Trans. Helen Craig McCullough). But Kyoriku injects a pessimistic note by commenting, “…That may be the case, but in this latter age, the primary obstacle to the way of Japanese poetry is money” (Saredo sue no yo ni atatte, waka no michi ni taisuru mono wa kane nari). The passage derives from the final section of the essay on “Vocabulary of the Fou

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