尹大納言絵巻に関する若干の考察

The In-no-Dainagon E-maki, Picture-scroll ‘Chief Councillor of State and concurrently Superintendent-General,’ in the collection of the Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka Prefecture, consists of two parts-(I) court nobles’ recollection, in the moonlight, of a grand Imperial Wa-ka (Japanese poetry) party and (II) court ladies’ talks, on the Star Festival evening, about music, vocal and instrumental. Unlike other picture-scrolls which contain explanatory texts this E-maki writes only the court nobles’ and ladies’ conversations, with the ordinal numbers of utterance, in the pictures themselves. Although the E-maki is traditionally attributed to the authorship of In-no-Dainagon KAZAN'IN (FUJIWARA) Morokata, it is not yet scientifically established. The author finds a genuine specimen of Morokata's handwriting in his sutra colophon, offered by the late Premier Kantarō SUZUKI to the Komikado Shrine, Chiba Prefecture, dedicated to the memory of Morokata. Comparing the colophone with the E-maki, she says with confidence that the E-maki is in Morotaka's handwriting. As a consequence of the foregoing, it goes without saying that the E-maki was written not later than the tenth month of the second year of Genkō, 1332, Morokata's death date. On the other hand, as Morokata called himself “In-no-Dainagon,” Chief Councillor of State and concurrently SuperintendentGeneral, in the E-maki, it was written not earlier than the second month of the first year of Karyaku (the third year of Shōchū), 1326, when he took the position. The author supposes Morokata, nostalgic of the good old day, wrote the E-maki while he lived in exile in the rural Province of Shimousa, now Chiba Prefecture, during the civil war of the Genkō era. In addition, the author found a fragment of the In-no-Dainagon E-maki in the Ko-hitsu Te-kagami (old calligraphy album) Gyokujun Ijō owned by the Fujita Art Museum, Osaka. The fragment represents a court lady with her talk on the Imperial Wa-ka anthology Gyokuyō Shū. Because the same ordinal numbers of utterance as the fragment (“3rd” and “8th”) really exist both in Parts I and II of the Fukuoka E-maki, it is indisputably evident that the E-maki has or had at least one more part still unknown probably dealing with Wa-ka anthologies, from which the fragment was cut off.