This ninth-century scroll, now destroyed in war, contained on either side the graphic record of strategies of writing, reading and interpretation between languages. On one side, the Tōdaiji fujumonkō text shows the katakana syllabary originally designed for glossing Chinese used for the first attested time to write Japanese in combination with Chinese characters; on the other side, the Kegon mongi yōketsu manuscript bears witness to the technique of ‘vernacular glossing’, enabling Chinese text written by a Korean cleric to be read in what can be argued to be either Korean or Japanese.