Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts by Naohiro Ōta (review)

Abstract

A chief challenge that all scholars of premodern Japan are bound to encounter in the course of their careers is acquiring sufficient skills to read and understand komonjo, a term used to describe various types of documents produced before the Meiji period (1868–1912). The challenge is twofold. First, komonjo feature grammatical structures and words that are no longer in use or that have assumed different meanings in modern Japanese. Second, premodern documents are often written using kuzushiji, a cursive style in which the original shape of the characters is altered, thus making the task of reading texts particularly daunting. In Japan, where the field of paleography emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, an abundance of komonjo manuals and dictionaries have been published over the years. Additionally, Japanese universities, museums, and other research institutions routinely offer classes for the study of premodern documents. Outside of Japan, however, opportunities are more limited, despite the initiatives launched in the past decade by European and American universities. In this context, Naohiro Ōta’s volume, Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection, possibly the first komonjo primer in English, is a longawaited and muchneeded contribution. Ōta, a professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (Tokyo), developed the volume as a byproduct of an international project involving Japanese and European scholars to catalog and digitize a forgotten collection of premodern Japanese documents donated by Mario Marega, a Salesian missionary to Japan, to the Vatican Apostolic Library in the 1950s. The approximately 14,500 documents that Marega collected during his time in Ōita Prefecture were produced between the seventeenth and the nineteenth