Kunimura is the founder of the Enjū school of Higo province, and the published sources set him within the orbit of Yamashiro Rai. According to the prevailing account he was the son of Hiromura of the Yamato Senjuin line, who married a daughter of Rai Kuniyuki, so that Kunimura is transmitted as Kuniyuki's grandson through that daughter and a pupil in the Rai workshop; the school name 延寿, Enjū, reads on the same characters as the Rai line itself. From him issued the smiths who carried the school, Kuniyoshi, Kunitoki, Kuniyasu, Kunitomo, Kunisuke, Kuninobu and Kunitsuna among them, and from the close of Kamakura through the Nanbokuchō period the family flourished at Kumafu in Kikuchi District. His own dated standing falls in the late Kamakura period, and one of his signed tachi, the Tokubetsu Jūyō blade of 2012, still survives ubu at 87.8 cm with a two-character signature cut in somewhat thick chisel strokes near the center of the tang.
The published descriptions characterize the Enjū hand as the Yamashiro Rai look carried south to the provinces, and they say plainly that the school "in general resembles the Rai school"[[c:1]]. What separates it is a set of provincial accents on that Kyoto manner. The forging shows "a noticeable masame-tinge together with conspicuous whitish utsuri"[[c:2]], the shirake-utsuri being the surest single Enjū tell, the cool reflection of a steel that is not quite the bright Rai jigane. The temper is suguha, either chū-suguha or the narrower hoso-suguha, with the nioiguchi drawn somewhat shizumi, sunken and quiet, frequently breaking into nijūba, the doubled line that recurs across his blades. The bōshi completes the signature: where Rai turns back in a tight ko-maru, the Enjū tip is rounded on a larger radius, an ō-maru with a shallow, short turnback.
The jigane is a ko-itame well packed and close, mixed with mokume and running into nagare-hada toward the edge, with ji-nie laid on finely and delicate chikei entering; in places the grain flows strongly and leans to masame, and over it stands the faint whitish utsuri the sources keep returning to. The suguha is laid down in deep nioi with ko-nie adhering, ko-ashi and at times a small ko-gunome feeling entering, fine sunagashi drawn through it; the activity within the edge is gentle rather than busy, and the nioiguchi in his better work is bright and clear even where it sinks. On the Tokubetsu Jūyō tachi the published commentary reads this suguha "inherited from the Rai tradition"[[c:3]] as producing "a profound, subdued and quiet flavor"[[c:4]], the temper restrained, the ko-nie calm, the whole understated rather than showy.
His work survives only as tachi, the published record noting that "his production is confined to tachi"[[c:5]], with no tantō or other forms yet seen; the long blades come down either ubu or ō-suriage into katana, and the surviving signed pieces are all tachi. Two registers can be read in the corpus. The signed ubu-tachi are slender, long, with a marked taper from base to tip, deep sori with funbari, and a small kissaki; this 細身・幅差顕著・小鋒 form the sources call "distinctive to Kunimura even within the school"[[c:6]], and it is precisely this sugata that lets an appraiser narrow a mumei Enjū blade down to Kunimura himself, as the 2019 and 2021 Jūyō commentaries do explicitly. The ō-suriage mumei katana form the second register, shortened from such tachi and attributed by the same reasoning. One Tokubetsu Jūyō katana even preserves the cut-off, signed tang-tip, inserted back into the shortened nakago as a gaku-mei so the signature would not be lost.
The distinction the sources care about is Enjū against Rai, and they draw it from Kunimura's own traits rather than from the Rai blades. One Jūyō katana feels "the air of Kyoto work, of the Rai school in particular"[[c:7]] in its wheel-like curvature, yet the depth and tightening of its nioiguchi place it with Enjū; another, grounded in Rai workmanship, is said to "reveal a Yamato temperament"[[c:8]] in its flowing jigane and ō-maru bōshi. The Jūyō Bijutsuhin commentary by Honma puts the kinship and its limit in one phrase: Enjū work "resembles Rai yet differs a little"[[c:9]], carrying some whitishness and a masame-air, and its suguha shows activity "more sparing than the suguha of the Rai school"[[c:10]]. That quieter, cooler register is the whole point of the school, and Kunimura is the smith who sets it.
In Fujishiro's grading Kunimura is Jō-jō saku, and the Tōkō Taikan values his work at one million yen, a high standing for a provincial founder. The designated record runs to one Important Cultural Property, two Tokubetsu Jūyō and eight Jūyō, ten blades in the Tokubetsu Jūyō and Jūyō tiers, divided about evenly between signed and ō-suriage mumei pieces. The provenance behind them is considerable: the Important Cultural Property descends through the Kuroda family, one tachi through Tokugawa Iesato and the Tokugawa family, others through Nanbu Toshihide, Itō Harumasa and Yamada Fukunosuke; of recorded whereabouts, examples are held by the Hayashibara Museum of Art, the Idemitsu Art Museum and the Okayama Museum of Art. The Important Cultural Property is heritage held in trust and will not trade. The remainder, the Tokubetsu Jūyō and Jūyō blades, come to market only from time to time and with patience; a signed ubu tachi by the founder of Enjū is among the rarer things a collector of Higo work could hope to encounter, and most of what survives is the ō-suriage mumei attribution rather than the signed blade.
