Only seldom does poetry--particularly classical poetry--make front-page news in Japan, but it did briefly in the spring of 1980 when a man named Reizei Tamet announced that he would soon be opening the Kyoto storehouses of his family to share with the outside world the literary manuscripts that had served that family as both financial and cultural capital for the past eight centuries. One by-product of this event was the subsequent publication of a sixty-volume set of photographic reproductions of original manuscripts; another was increased interest in the prominent role played by the Reizei family in medieval and early modern Japanese literary history.

The founder of the Reizei house, which could claim direct descent from one of the main lines of the Fujiwara clan, was a man known as Tamesuke (1263-1328), one of the younger sons of Fujiwara no Tameie, who was in the turn the son of Fujiwara...