Four Katabira Purporting to Have Been Used by Uesugi Kenshin: The Third Report on Costumes Said to Have been Used by Uesugi Kenshin and Uesugi Kagekatsu

Roughly speaking, the Japanese technical term "kire" means a strip of paper containing a few lines cut off from an old copy of a book, Japanese or Chinese, Buddhist or secular. Such strips are usually pasted in a specimen album (te-kagami) for purposes of calligraphic appreciations. Hinogire (gire < kire) or Hino Fragments are from the copy of the Senzai Wakashū (1187 A. D.), one of the Nijūichi-dai Shū or twenty-one Japanese poem anthologies compiled by Imperial command, which was hand-written by the compiler FUJIWARA no Shunzei (alias FUJIWARA no Toshinari; 11141204) himself. Therefore, Hino Fragments are of basic importance for the study of the Senzai Wakashū. The author, in this number, makes search for as many fragments as possible and puts this important text of the anthology into print, giving it collationary notes which show the superiority of the text to other texts of the Senzai Wakashū. The number of the collected Hino-gire Fragments is 68, and that of the poems contained reaches 159 poems. Besides, the writer wishes to call the reader's attention to the hitherto overlooked question concerning false Hino Fragments dangerously apt to lead the students to an erroneous conclusion, and tells the main differences of the real from the false. She also attempts to reconstruct the original form of the book from which the Hino Fragments come, and refers to the postscript added to one of the fragments by KARASUMA, Mitsuhiro (1579– 1638), a court noble and man of letters, which attributes the fragment to Shunzei. Lastly, the author comments on the calligraphic value of these fragments hand-written by FUJIWARA no Shunzei, noted for his handwriting of marked individuality, whom she dealt with in one of her preceding papers, "Letters by FUJIWARA no Shunzei" in No. 197 of this journal in 1958. Appended is a list of names of more than ten groups of kire from old hand-written copies of the Senzai Wakashū other than the Hino-gire. The present article will, the writer hopes, be useful to the students of Japanese literature, especially poetry, as well as to the students of Japanese calligraphy.