Born at Anzai on the outskirts of Sunpu in Suruga Province, the smith who signed himself Omura Kaboku (大村加卜) came to swordmaking by an unusual road. His personal name was Omori Jibuzaemon, and his primary calling was medicine; the describe him as a physician, even a surgeon, who entered the service of Matsudaira Mitsunaga, lord of the Takada Domain in Echigo, on the strength of his medical practice. After that house was dispossessed by kaieki he became a rōnin, went up to , and later took service with Tokugawa Mitsukuni of the Mito Domain. By his own account in Hihō ("Secret Treasures of Swords"), he began forging in the third month of Shōhō 1 (1644) and produced one hundred blades over the forty-one years until Jōkyō 1 (1684). His teacher is not clearly recorded, and the inscriptions show he at times styled himself Yasuhide.
Kaboku worked in two principal modes, and the blades bear this out. One is a flamboyant manner: mixed with , densely forged with prominent , carrying large mixed with , with and entering frequently and a clear . The other is a -inflected mode of broad foundation mixed in a companion manner with , -like elements, and shallow , into which thick adheres and a deep forms, with , , , and coursing through; the there can temper deeply toward an character before turning back in . On one such work the read a keen awareness of Go Yoshihiro. The tends to with and flowing , the grain standing slightly, with and and at times a somewhat blackish steel. To recognize the hand, look also to the : , , large file marks, and a long thick-chisel signature carried high on the , frequently paired on the with an inscription describing the forging.
Those forging inscriptions are themselves a point. The phrase jūgo- kabuse (true fifteen-plate kabuse construction), or its ten-plate variant, appears on the great majority of his works, and the declaration kaji ni arazu ("I am not a swordsmith") records his stance as a scholar who forged. Among named pieces, one carries the gold-inlaid "Ōigawa," likely added by a later owner who likened its to the Kyoto river, and a Yasuhide-signed blade dated Shōhō 2 (1645) serves as source material fixing an early work. The name Bandō Tarō Toden among his disciples. His -tradition pieces are held to be his masterworks, one called probably his crowning achievement, and the line stands as the rare instance of a physician who set his learning to the anvil at Mito.