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About the maker

Suishinshi Masatsugu正次

A katana dated Tenpō 12, mid-autumn of 1841 and signed Suishinshi Masatsugu carries, on the reverse of its tang, the name of the man who commissioned it, and the published commentary on it sets out the whole of what is known of the smith. Masatsugu, also called Kawabe Kitaji, was a late-Edo shinshintō maker of Edo who took the art-name Suishinshi and so, in substance, succeeded as the third head of the Kawabe house. The line was that of Suishinshi Masahide, the father of shinshintō, but Masatsugu's own hand came by a more particular descent: he trained under Taikei Naotane, Masahide's foremost pupil, and is recorded to have become Naotane's son-in-law, with a further tradition that he was a son of the second-generation Masahide. He lived in Okachimachi, Shitaya, pursued a life given to swordmaking, and is said to have died on the eleventh day of the third month of Man'en 1, 1860. Of his manner the published sources are emphatic and exact, holding that down even to the cut of his signature his workmanship is wholly Naotane's rather than the broader Suishinshi style (全く直胤流), and that he excelled in the two traditions Naotane himself worked, Sōshū-den and Bizen-den (相州伝と備前伝が得意). His representative manner is the Sōshū-den one, and three of his Jūyō katana are read by the judges as exemplars of it. Over a tightly forged ko-itame the hamon runs as a ko-notare broken by gunome and small gunome with chōji-like heads mixed in, the nioi deep and the nie thick, with patches of coarse nie intermingled. Along the habuchi the line frays into hotsure, sunagashi and nie-suji stream vigorously, a nijūba effect appears, kinsuji enter and slight tobiyaki detaches from the temper. These activities are not occasional but constant, running through every blade in the group, so that the swept boshi, turning round with frequent hakikake, and the kinsuji and sunagashi crossing the ji and ha are the connective tissue of his work rather than its highlights. The temper sits on a build that is large and robust, the mihaba wide, the kasane thick, the sori rather deep and the point carried out to an extended chū-kissaki, in one late piece to a full ō-kissaki. The published sources call the best of these large works free of any breakdown and outstanding among his oeuvre (破綻がなく、同作中抜群の出来映え), a katana in which his true strengths are fully brought to bear (本領が遺憾なく発揮された). The jigane is a closely packed ko-itame, well forged, on one blade running into a moist, clinging texture with chikei-like shining lines entering frequently, on another mixing ō-mokume into the lower body, and on the latest mixing in somewhat larger mokume throughout. Over it the ji-nie lies thick and fine chikei enter, the steel on his clearest pieces notably bright, so that both ji and ha shine with a clear quality. In one work of Tenpō 8 the nioiguchi takes on a subdued, sinking character, but elsewhere the keynote is brightness; on the Tenpō 12 katana now in an American collection the published sources single out the way both ji and ha are richly covered in nie and brilliantly clear, calling it a piece that recalls the manner of his teacher Naotane (師、直胤の作風を髣髴とさせる). The Sōshū-den hand he favored is therefore read first in this combination of a thick, bright nie ji and a nie-worked midareba, the activity gathered as much in the ji as along the edge. The second of his two traditions, the Bizen-den, leads instead with chōji. On the katana in the American collection the hamon is chōji mixed with gunome, the ashi long and entering well, the nioi deep and the nie thick, with small tobiyaki mingling in the yakigashira and a nioiguchi that runs bright and clear; the forging beneath keeps the same tightly packed ko-itame with its ji-nie and chikei. The latest of the dated katana, of Tenpō 6, shows how close the two traditions stood in his hand: over a forging that mixes mokume recalling Naotane's whirlpool-like uzumaki-hada (直胤の渦巻肌を思わせる) runs a notare-toned midareba centered on gunome with chōji and pointed elements, frequent tobiyaki, long ashi and the nie thickly adhering. That blade carries on the omote, set toward the mune, the divine title Hachiman Daijin, a votive inscription, while the date and the smith's name with kaō are cut at the center of the reverse. Both registers, the judges insist, descend alike from Naotane, and the difference between them is the difference between the two manners Naotane himself taught rather than two phases of Masatsugu's career. What sets his work apart is therefore best read by his own grounded traits and by the closeness of his hand to his teacher's. The published sources describe his domain as one inherited whole from Naotane, in workmanship and in the very chisel-cut of his characters, so that the heavy-in-hand, grand and powerful taihai of his katana, thickly covered in nie and bright (手持ちの重い豪壮な体配), reads as the faithful continuation of his master's art rather than as an independent invention. His signature is itself part of the kantei: a bold, slightly thick-chiseled five-character mei with kaō on the omote of an ubu tang finished with large ō-sujikai kesshō yasurime, the date and frequently a commissioner's name added on the reverse, the cut following Naotane in every particular. Against the broader Suishinshi school, which after Masahide's Bizen-den revival ran in many directions, Masatsugu's distinction is precisely his fidelity to the one teacher whose two traditions he reproduced with such evenness of quality. Masatsugu's record on the books is modest in extent and consistent in level. Four of his katana have passed Jūyō Tōken, all of them signed, dated work spanning Tenpō 6 to Tenpō 12, and the reference texts rate him Jō saku in skill, with a Tokō Taikan valuation in the middle range for a shinshintō smith. None of his blades carries a recorded provenance of named houses, and his designations stay at the Jūyō tier; his is a body of designated Jūyō katana rather than of museum-held heritage, and the holders entered on his blades are private collectors in Tochigi, Tokyo and the United States. For a collector this places him within reach in a way the great Kamakura names are not: a signed, dated Masatsugu katana in full Sōshū-den, large and bright and unmistakably of Naotane's school, is the kind of shinshintō work that comes to the serious market from time to time rather than once in a generation, and one of his four Jūyō blades appearing is a real but not unattainable opportunity. He is best had as what the published sources make him, a faithful and skilled inheritor of Taikei Naotane in whom the Sōshū-den of the shinshintō revival is carried at full strength.

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