Morinori of the Yoshii group signed his earliest surviving blade Province resident Yoshii Morinori and dated it the eighth month of Eiwa 4, a year corresponding to 1378, and from that of the late his work runs forward into the Oei era of the early fifteenth century in a small body of signed and dated pieces. Because none of his datable work descends beyond the , the published sources place him among the , the older tier of the school that the separates by name from the plainer Yoshii production of the full period. The Yoshii group is traditionally held to have begun with Tamenori in the late period, though works that far back are exceedingly rare, and within the surviving body it is the pieces of the fourteenth century, Morinori's among them, that carry the school at its finest. One of his , whose individual portion of the folded-back signature has been cut away, is appraised from the calligraphic style of the remaining characters as the work of the Morinori who was active around the Meitoku era of the 1390s.
His recognized hand is the school's own face read at its peak, and the published sources locate its heart in two things. The first is the temper, a linked in an orderly, continuous run, of which they write that "the greatest point of appreciation lies in the way the are linked in a regular sequence". On his broader this becomes a carried in a regular, repeating line with slight variation in the individual forms, the row mixing in somewhat pointed elements, with and entering, the standing strongly so that the loosens here and there into , and frequent running through it with entering the temper. On the Eiwa the hand reads as a mixed with pointed elements, the form already showing the variation that marks his row apart from a placid . The second hallmark lies in the , where the school raises an the published sources call distinctive among all works, one in which "the very shape of the hardened edge appears as though cast as a shadow" into the steel, so that the reflection seems to repeat the outline of the temper rather than the soft, cloud-like of the mainstream.
The beneath that is an that flows and stands somewhat in the grain, at times taking on an -like tendency that the published sources count as a further tell of the Yoshii , with applied and entering, and on one mixed into the and the whole forged tightly and well consolidated. Across his recognized work the enters in and turns back in a small or a slightly larger , on one blade running off into at the tip and on another with entering the turn. He carves a on both faces of his longer blades, terminated in on the Eiwa and run off in kaki-nagashi on the later . The signatures are long cut toward the , and where the blade has been shortened the long signature survives folded back as an , the device by which several of his pieces have kept their attribution through the loss of their original tang.
Apart from this prime hand the published sources record a quieter signed register in his Oei , a register the must hold separately from the linked . The dated is with , slightly extended in proportion as and with almost no curvature, over an that flows toward the edge and is tightly forged throughout, the adhering and the temper a narrow in , the straight and turning back in a rounded form. On its he cut a and on the a carved in relief within a , the relief work giving the small standard-form blade its principal point of interest. The published sources read this as a well-composed work of small, standard form, and value it, together with the Eiwa , as a dated piece that fixes his period of manufacture, the two inscriptions bracketing his career from the late into Oei.
What sets Morinori apart from the rest of fourteenth-century is therefore not power or flamboyance but the particular Yoshii combination his own blades carry. While the other branches were drawn through the period into the consolidated mainstream, the Yoshii group alone continued and held its distinctive linked and its school , and Morinori stands among the dated smiths whose signed pieces fix that late- manner. On his finest the published sources find not only this smith's hand but the characteristic style of the entire group clearly shown, in the -tending , the reflected and the regular strongly covered in with frequent , and they judge both and sound. His name continues forward into the Yoshii line beside Kiyonori and the other dated hands of the school, so that he reads as one of the documentary anchors by which the older is told apart from the later production carrying the name.
Morinori's work survives in a small number of signed and dated pieces, four of them papered to the rank across the twenty-second, twenty-eighth and fortieth sessions, the inscriptions running from Eiwa 4 in 1378 through the Oei era. The Fujishiro appraisers rate him at the chu-jo level, a standing above the average run of the school's hands, and the published sources reserve their warmest assessment for his fortieth-session , of which they write that its "ample, robust and sound form is excellent, and along the strongly lustrous glitters, the workmanship outstanding". None of his blades carries one of the higher cultural-property designations, and none carries a recorded provenance, so his pieces belong to the upper- tier rather than to the museum-held patrimony of the great names. For a private collector this means a dated, signed Morinori, when one of the few survives to come to market, is an attainable rather than an unreachable thing, though it appears only from time to time and rewards patience, valued less for rarity of name than for being a signed and datable witness to the late- Yoshii hand at its most characteristic.