I'm working on Buson jihitsu Nozarashi kikô emaki no kôsatsu - Sono honbun keitô joretsu o chûshin ni (Nozarashi kikô in Buson's handwriting - Centering on the compilation history of the main text) by Yayoshi Ken'ichi, in Kinsei bungei kô, No. 2, pp. 1-12, 1960.
It's very similar to what's in his book, but I just wanted to mention it because I love the article for being handwritten. I've posted an excerpt, left. How amazing, though. Considering these days typing on a keyboard itself seems a chore. I love the person's handwriting -- it's gorgeous. (Could it be done by Yayoshi himself? I only got a copy of the article itself by interlibrary loan. The next time I have a chance to go to Harvard-Yenching I'll check it out.)
He talks about the difficulty of identifying the owner of the piece, how he tried to track it down in the Itsuo Bijutsukan collection, where Sanseidô's Bashô kôza article by Professor Sugiura had claimed it was, and even asked Okada Rihei himself about it, but it turned out that this information was wrong. He also found another reference for it that was wrong, this time in a volume on Buson published by Heibonsha. So he ended up working from a reproduction published by Tôkyô Bijutsu sha. (A quick glance at recent photographs of the piece in books simply say it's owned by a "private collection." Mysterious!)
Up until the point he was working on the article, no one had written about Buson's Nozarashi kikô. He thinks it's particularly interesting because of the variations it introduces, and the insights it gives into textual history. Yayoshi then does his amazing work analyzing and graphing out all the variations he sees, and links them up to other existing versions.
So, Yayoshi's article here isn't all that useful for what I'm trying to do. On the other hand, on a whole, his work on Nozarashi kikô is really detailed. It's been 50-odd years since he published this material, and maybe more has been done since which I can follow up on, but what's interesting is thinking about what this reveals about the vast enthusiasm for Nozarashi kikô and Bashô's travel journals in general. Bashô fans were extremely avid, obviously. Not altogether impeccably accurate in their copying skills, perhaps, but from this we can see what a great demand there was for anything written by Bashô, especially anything to do with travel.
