Starting Bid

¥3,500,000

Tracked across 76 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the maker

Enju Kunisuke國資

Enju Kunisuke worked at Kumafu in Kikuchi District of Higo Province, a leading hand of the Enju school across the close of the Kamakura period and into the Nanbokucho. By tradition he was a son of the founder Taro Kunimura, who is recorded as a grandson through a daughter of Rai Kuniyuki of Yamashiro, so that Kunisuke stands as the second generation of a lineage that carried the Rai Yamashiro idiom south to the provinces. His activity is fixed by a *tanto* dated Karyaku 2 (1327), one of the rare dated pieces of a school in which year-marked work is scarce. The published sources read the school as one broad manner with little individual variation, and within that uniformity they return repeatedly to a single judgment about Kunisuke: surveying the surviving works, the NBTHK writes, one perceives that he was "a smith of considerable skill even within the lineage" (かなりの腕利きであった), ranked with Kunitoki and Kuniyasu among its strongest smiths. The name is recorded as continuing two or three generations into Muromachi, the technique declining as it descends, and the NBTHK treats the line under one head. What distinguishes Kunisuke within an otherwise even school is the abundance of activity in his *ha*. Where the school's temper is a quiet *chu*- or *hoso-suguha* with calmer internal work, his is the busiest hand of the line: a *suguha* base that frequently takes *ko-gunome* and somewhat angular *gunome*, with abundant *nie*, vigorous *sunagashi*, *kinsuji* and *nie-suji*, the *nioiguchi* at times sinking and at times brightening. The published sources mark the difference as a matter of degree rather than kind. Of one *o-suriage* *mumei* *katana* the NBTHK observes that its *sunagashi* runs "more violently than usual" (常よりも一段と砂流しがはげしく), its *gunome* pointed, and judges the result uncommon within the school. Above this busy temper sits the feature the judges name as his alone: on his wide, *sunobi* *wakizashi* and *tanto*, the *boshi* is hardened deep and breaks into a violent flame, rising and pointing back, the *omote* taking a *kaen* form. Of the Tokubetsu Juyo *wakizashi* the published record states plainly that this deeply tempered, fierce flaming *boshi* is "without parallel even among this smith's own work and within the Enju school" (同工および同派の中でも類がない). The forging is a packed *itame* or *ko-itame* that flows toward *masame*, mixed at times with *mokume*, and on his wider pieces the grain stands a little, the *hada-dachi* tendency answering the liveliness of the *ha*. Across the *ji* lie dust-fine *ji-nie*, applied thickly, and fine *chikei* that enter well, over which the school's pale *shirake-utsuri* rises. The *boshi* of his quieter blades closes *sugu* into a *komaru* or a large-radius *o-maru* with a shallow turnback, often with *hakikake* at the tip. Against the parent Rai school the published sources fix the differences precisely: the *masame*-lean and the whitish steel, the *nioiguchi* tending toward *shizumi*, the calmer internal activity, and the larger, shallower-returning *boshi*. These are the named recognition points of Enju, and Kunisuke shows them all, the standing *ji* a degree more than his profiled siblings. His surviving work falls into two registers. The first is the active manner of the Nanbokucho phase: wide, *sunobi* *wakizashi* and *tanto*, read as Nanbokucho from their broad bodies and stretched length, carrying the busy *ha* and the flaming *boshi* described above. The second is a quieter register of slender *ubu* *tachi* with deep *koshizori* and small *kissaki*, and *o-suriage* *mumei* *katana* whose deep arc-like *wazori* preserves a Kyoto air. Of one such *mumei* *katana*, finely packed in *ko-itame* with bright *chu-suguha*, the NBTHK writes that its workmanship "closely recalls Kyo-mono" (京物に似通う作域), so that the attribution to the technically accomplished Kunisuke is fully persuasive. On certain of his *tachi* the judges note an unusual thing for the line: the temper construction is the one usually seen on the school's *tanto*. His signature is itself a kantei point. Among all Enju smiths he cuts the boldest two-character *mei*, set close and "with the thickest chisel within the school" (同派の中でも最も太鏨にきり); and where most of the line cuts the right element inside the *kuni* enclosure in an ear-shaped manner, in Kunisuke that tendency is not conspicuous. Kunisuke is read within the school less by a different kind of work than by degree, and the published sources place him by his proximity to Rai. The *shu-mei* *tanto* states the point the whole school turns on: that the work "at a glance can resemble Rai Kunimitsu and the like" (一見来国光などに見える), which the judges take as corroboration of the tradition that the founder Kunimura was a pupil of Rai Kunitoshi. His own preservation of that Kyoto air on the slender *tachi* and the *wazori* *katana* closes the lineage from the Rai side, while the busy *ha* and the unique flaming *boshi* mark the distance the school had travelled by his generation. A few of his blades carry the school's documentary curiosities: a *naginata-naoshi* signed on the *haura*, rare for the line, and another whose cut-off signed tang-tip was reset as a *gakumei* when the blade was shortened. Among the Enju hands the judges set him with Kunitoki and Kuniyasu at the head of the line, the standing *ji*, the busiest *ha* and the flaming *boshi* of his wide pieces marking him out within a school that otherwise reads as one manner. Fujishiro grades Kunisuke *Jo-jo saku*. Seventeen of his blades stand in the Tokubetsu Juyo and Juyo tiers, one as a Juyo Bijutsuhin, and the survival of *ubu*, signed examples is itself prized in the published descriptions, the more so where the dated *tanto* anchors his chronology. The provenance against his name is unusually grand for a provincial smith: blades passing through Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, and held in the Hosokawa, Date, Uesugi and Tokugawa houses. The Tayasu Tokugawa *tachi* carries a history written out by Count Tokugawa Satotaka in 1919: Hideyoshi bestowed it on Takenaka Uneme, it passed to Ieyasu, then to the Mito Tokugawa as an heirloom of Yorifusa, and finally to the Tayasu branch under Munetake. Of his designated works of recorded whereabouts, examples are held by the Sano Art Museum, the Seikado Bunko Art Museum, the Tokugawa Art Museum and Oyamazumi Jinja. For a private collector a Kunisuke is among the more attainable of the Higo Kamakura names, since most survive in the tradeable Tokubetsu Juyo and Juyo tiers; even so the great majority are held, not traded, and a signed and dated example, or one of the flaming-*boshi* *sunobi* pieces, comes to market only rarely.

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