Many questions surround the anonymous medieval work known as Saigyo monogatari (translated here as “The Tale of Saigyo”, and for simplicity generally referred to as “the Tale”). When was it first created? By whom, and for what intended audience? By what process did it proliferate into the many variant texts that have come down to us? How many other variants may once have existed? What is the relationship between the existing variants, and which can be considered the earliest? Might this be the “original text”, or is it too a reworking of some now lost original text? ¶ In the last forty years, these questions have been taken up by a number of scholars, but to date there has been no full-length study that takes into account the wide range of variant texts and attempts in any systematic way to analyze them in a search for answers. The present study seeks to fill this gap. I compare 11 texts, consisting of representatives from all the main variant categories and including all the texts which are known to be, or which seem to me to be, early forms. Detailed textual comparison can be found in Appendix 1. ¶ Part I introduces the background to the Tale’s development, and the variant texts. In Part II, I translate the variant known as Bunmeibon. Many scholars have either claimed or simply assumed that Bunmeibon is a close version of the Tale’s original form. I take issue with this belief, and one of the aims of this study is to pursue the question of the relationship of the B text line (of which Bunmeibon is representative) with the A text line, which has generally been regarded as the secondary or “abridged” line, with the purpose of establishing that it is rather the A line that retains traces of the original text and of the impulses that led to the Tale’s original formation. ¶ The detailed comments which follow each section of the Bunmeibon translation are intended both to place it within the context of the other ten variants and draw out their possible relationships, and to examine other issues that the section raises in relation to the Tale as a whole. Most of these issues hinge on the question of how Saigyo is depicted. I trace the volatile shifts that occur between the two poles of Saigyo as poet and Saigyo as religious practitioner, how the Tale does and does not attempt to merge the two, and what forms this double Saigyo image takes as the Tale progresses, both inter- and intra-textually. ¶ This question is fundamentally linked with the above question of relationship between the text lines. The scholars who focus their study on Bunmeibon largely assume that the main focus of the Tale is religious in intent. I hope to show that the Tale’s fundamental form in all variants does not reflect this, that much of the religious material found in Bunmeibon and the other B texts is the result of interpolation and reworking, and that it is the early A texts’ more literary focus that contains the likely key to the original impulses behind the Tale’s formation. ¶ Part III draws together the results of my investigation, and situates the Tale within the wider context of the kyogen kigo debate.