Kageyori is a swordsmith of the group, known today by a small number of signed two-character spanning the period. His name is one of the problems of old . Examining the surviving signatures, the published sources hold that 'it appears there were roughly three smiths using the name Kageyori in Province': the oldest is the hand with 'a boldly cut, large two-character signature', the latest is the one prefixing no at the close of the period, and works of the Kōan and Einin years of a somewhat older manner lie between. A second strand, the published sources note, carries the title Sakon-Shōgen and is dated to the Einin era, so that 'beyond the group there are pieces titled Sakon-Shōgen and dated to Einin' whose lineage is not clearly established. Each blade is therefore placed by its own and before it is assigned a generation.
His readable hand is a slender , the high at the waist and carried even where the tang has been shortened, the small, the dignified bearing of . The temper is the calm one of old , not the flamboyant of the contemporaneous Fukuoka : a -toned line, a or base into which he works and , with chōji-ashi and small entering. The field is never bare. On the shortened small mix in over a , adhere, and the tends tight; on the the gather well, with and running and the going straight into a .
The is old through and through. Over a well-packed on the one blade rises a clear , the steel the published sources read as one stylistic mode of late- ; on the other the forging runs to an inclining to stand a little, with well developed. From that slender form and the well-worked of and , the published sources judge the second blade 'a -period work appraised as of the lineage'. The two together show one quiet manner read across a small spread of quality, the -bearing and the -based clove the constant tells.
What sets him apart from his neighbours is exactly this restraint. Where the Fukuoka of the decades raise a high, showy , Kageyori keeps a -toned , the present only as and small clusters in the line, the of old standing in the . He belongs among the old- hands who worked before and beside the flowering, his attribution resting on era and the old- character of his steel rather than on a fixed descent.
Kageyori survives in a small but high designated record. Fujishiro assigns him no grade, and the Tōkō Taikan values his work in the mid range. Three signed are designated Important Cultural Property: one at the Tokyo National Museum, one at the Kishū -gū in Wakayama bearing a Sakon-Shōgen signature dated to the second year of Shōō, and one at Inaba Jinja in Gifu. These are designated cultural property, patrimony held in museums and shrines, not blades that come to market. Two further signed are designated , one shortened and formerly in a Tokyo collection, one in Hyōgo, with a blade of his recorded in the old Arima holdings. Across the and tiers only the two are recorded, so a signed Kageyori in private hands is among the rarer things a collector of early could hope to encounter, and one appears, when it does, only with patience.
