SOURCE: Hare, Thomas Blenman. “Reading Kamo no Chōmei.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 1 (1989): 173-228.

In the following essay, Hare discusses Chōmei's writings, noting that scholars disagree on how best to approach his work.

The only extant scrap of Kamo no Chōmei's handwriting is a brief note in kanbun, now in a private collection. The some thirty characters on the page, in grass script in a pleasing but slightly busy hand, must have been written unselfconsciously and with little prior deliberation or aesthetic pretense; the note is simply a receipt for the now unknown borrower of seven bamboo sudare: “Of the seven screens, you had graciously returned five previously. [Now] you have indeed returned the remaining two. Most respectfully signed, this twenty-third day of the first month, Nagaakira.”¹ It is probably simply an accident of history that this piece of calligraphy has survived, but there...