Norishige worked in at the end of , a pupil of Kunimitsu and a brother-student of Yukimitsu and Masamune, with whom he carried the tradition to its maturity. Older texts such as the Kokon Zukushi list him among Masamune's ten disciples, but the dated blades that survive, in the Shōwa, Engen and years, and the form of his and , lead the published sources to read him by the -era account as a pupil of Kunimitsu and a brother-student of Masamune, perhaps a little the earlier of the two.
The common manner, and the one that bears his name, is (松皮肌). His stands boldly, often in a large pattern mixed with , and through it thick enter abundantly until the surface reads like the bark of a pine; the steel is dark, the thick. The published sources place him closest of the great hands to Masamune, yet note that he expresses the changes of even more openly than Masamune, so that the and the together show what they call the ten-thousand changes of . The bold standing grain laced with thick is the mechanism behind the pine-bark, and it runs through the great majority of his work.
Over that runs a mixed with in deep , the subdued and sunken, the opposite of bright , alive with abundant and , with and drifting . The is a point the older profiles got wrong: it does not merely turn back in a small round, it sweeps out strongly in into a , at times pointed or burned through in , the brushed of the tip continuous with the restless below. The sunken and that swept, -broken are as much his signature as the bark itself.
There is a second manner, and it is the refined one the connoisseur prizes. On his rare signed and his early dated signed the does not stand as much as usual; the forging tightens to a calmer fine , the and both quieter, the steel brighter and more clearly lit, the and more restrained. A representative signed is marked as calmer in and than his usual work, its small- temper sunk over the swirling Norishige grain still legible beneath; an early signed of Shōwa 3 is read as standing less, brighter, and connecting to Kunimitsu and Yukimitsu, his earlier hand. This fine, bright forging is not a lapse from the but a distinct and highly regarded facet of him.
For recognition the two manners share the same core: thick dark , a subdued sunken , and running busily, and the swept . The subdued parts him from the bright of ; the openly varied and the heavier standing grain part him from Masamune, whose runs through a tighter, quieter . Where the bark is absent, on the fine signed pieces, the and the sunken carry the attribution. Fujishiro grades him Sai-jō , and among all swordsmiths his count stands near the very top.
His signed work is itself a rarity: it is mostly , and signed are so few that an earlier appraisal could count only two; the designated corpus today holds four — two Important Cultural Properties and two — the rest of his work and . The named blades carry the histories of the great houses: a signed passed from Toyotomi Hideyoshi's circle and through Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, who bestowed it at the Yanagisawa residence, into the Yanagisawa family, while others descended through the Shimazu, the Maeda, the Hosokawa and the Ii. A few of his own works look back to and for an archaic flavor. His pine-bark forging did not die with him; his pupil Tametsugu carried it west, where it became the mark of the later smiths.
