with Chinese logographs. (1995:11) The kanji first appears in the (12th-century) Konjaku Monogatarishū, but two 8th-century transcriptions of the word sakaki are , meaning "sage tree" (Kojiki, tr. Chamberlain 1981:64 "pulling up by pulling its roots a true cleyera japonica with five hundred [branches] from the Heavenly Mount Kagu"), and , meaning "slope tree" (Nihon Shoki, tr. Aston 1896:42–43, "True Sakaki tree of the Heavenly Mt. Kagu"). Sakaki ( or ) is the title of Chapter 10 in The Tale of Genji (ca. 1021). It comes from this context. "May I at least come up to the veranda?" he asked, starting up the stairs. The evening moon burst forth and the figure she saw in its light was handsome beyond describing. Not wishing to apologize for all the weeks of neglect, he pushed a branch of the sacred tree in under the blinds. "With heart unchanging as this evergreen, This sacred tree, I enter the sacred gate." She replied: "You err with your sacred tree and sacred gate. No beckoning cedars stand before my house." And he: "Thinking to find you here with the holy maidens, I followed the scent of the leaf of the sacred tree." Though the scene did not encourage familiarity, he made bold to lean inside the blinds. (tr. Seidensticker 1976:187) The etymology of the pronunciation sakaki is uncertain. With linguistic consensus that the -ki suffix denotes ("tree"), the two most probable etymologies are either sakae-ki ("evergreen tree"), from ; or saka-ki ("boundary tree"), from – an older form of modern reading sakai, from the way that trees were often planted at a shrine's boundary line. Carr (1995:13) cites Japanese tradition and historical phonology to support the latter etymon. The Shogakukan Kokugo Dai Jiten Dictionary entry for this term also notes that the pitch accent for sakayu () – the origin of modern sakae () – is different than what would be expected, suggesting that may be the more likely derivation (Shogakukan 1988). References Aston, William George, tr. 1896. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. Kegan Paul. 1972 Tuttle reprint. Carr, Michael. 1995. "Sacred Twig and Tree: Tamagushi and Sakaki in Japanese-English Dictionaries", The Review of Liberal Arts 小樽商科大学人文研究 89:1–36. Chamberlain, Basil H., tr. 1919. The Kojiki, Records of Ancient Matters. 1981 Tuttle reprint. Min, Tianlu and Bruce Bartholomew, 2015, Cleyera japonica, Missouri Botanical Garden and Harvard University Herbaria. Seidensticker, Edward