¥5,800,000

Tracked across 77 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the maker

Nakajima Rai Kuninaga國長

Rai Kuninaga was a pupil of Rai Kunitoshi who left Kyoto and settled at Nakajima in Settsu Province, and from that move the line he founded took the name by which the published sources still call it, "Nakajima Rai" (中島来). Those sources count two generations under the single name Kuninaga, the first recorded in the Gentoku era at the very end of Kamakura and the second active in Nanbokucho around the Shohei and Oan years; the designated record gathered here is almost wholly that second-generation hand, working in the broad, large-pointed shape of the Enbun and Joji decades. His standing is fixed by a sentence the judges repeat across his blades: among the Rai group his work comes closest to Rai Kunimitsu, and at times to Rai Kunitsugu, yet yields a little to those masters in dignity and refinement. From that judgment follows the practical use of his name, for from old times, as the published sources put it, works that resemble Rai Kunimitsu yet are reckoned slightly inferior have been appraised as Kuninaga. The hand that sentence describes is genuinely a Rai hand carried south and turned a touch more provincial. Over a packed itame or ko-itame that takes on a nagare, masame-leaning tendency near the edge, the jigane of the Kyoto parent, famous for being tight and bright, here stands up somewhat, the grain lifting into a visible surface that the published sources record again and again as hadatachi. Thick ji-nie gathers across it and fine chikei wind through, and on the broad mumei katana this standing, flowing steel carries a Soshu-leaning weight that is the first thing separating one of his blades from a true Kyoto Rai. The temper laid over it is a broad chu-suguha, but it does not stay the plain, quiet suguha of the orthodox Rai line. It breaks instead into ko-notare and ko-gunome, with ashi and yo running in and ko-nie settling along the habuchi, and through the body of the ha run sunagashi and, on the finest pieces, kinsuji and a faint yubashiri above the line. That busier edge is the heart of his manner, and the judges single it out in the longest of his designations, where the abundant activity in and along the ha is said to give the whole working surface change and force. The nioiguchi, which the school as a whole tends to carry a shade sunk against the brighter Kyoto Rai, turns on his best mumei katana bright and clear, deep in nioi with the nie well applied. The boshi closes straight to a ko-maru and is frequently brushed with hakikake at the point; on the wide, large-kissaki late katana it runs up tsukiage into a yakizume tendency on the omote and points and turns back on the ura, a tip habit that follows the imposing Nanbokucho silhouette. Horimono are ordinary to the Rai inheritance, bo-hi carved through or run off as kaki-nagashi, sometimes with a companion groove, while the tanto take a plain suken with claws or a bonji with gomabashi beneath. The corpus divides cleanly into two registers, and the division is itself a tool of attribution. The signed survivals are almost all tanto and small wakizashi, broad in the blade and a little sun-nobi with a thin kasane, carrying a three-character mei cut below the mekugi-ana on the sashi-omote, the chisel by turns fine and boldly thick. Signed tachi are extremely rare, and signed work of the first generation rarer still, so that the published sources note the second generation's signed pieces survive in comparatively greater number. The other register is the mumei o-suriage katana of the Enbun and Joji shape, wide in body with little taper, deep in curvature and ending in a large point, attributed to Kuninaga on the reading of the jigane and then confirmed by appraisal. Several of these carry a Hon'ami gold inscription, a kinpun-mei of Hon'ami Koson or a kinzogan-mei of the sixteenth-generation Hon'ami Mitsuhisa, and one wakizashi is accompanied by a Hon'ami Kochu origami of the Kyoho years; the published sources judge that such transmissions may be accepted, the forging and tempering conforming to the appraisal. His place in the school is best taken from the way his blades are read against his relatives rather than from any claim of his own invention. A broad mumei katana of his can recall Rai Kunimitsu at first sight, and one of the later pieces is said even to call Rai Kunitsugu to mind, yet the standing nagare jigane, the somewhat sunk nioiguchi lifting only on his best work, and the overall level of the workmanship settle the attribution on Kuninaga. The distance is one of degree and not of kind: he keeps the Rai suguha, the Kyoto air and the bo-hi of the parent whole, and what he adds is the provincial, Soshu-leaning cast and the busier edge. The first generation is recorded keeping the orthodox Rai suguha, while the second made fewer pure suguha and many blades in midare-deki, and it is that more active second hand which the present blades document. The judges, weighing the broad ko-itame, the thick ji-nie and chikei and the well-entering ashi and yo, conclude that such a blade clearly manifests the characteristic traits of the Rai school. Kuninaga is a Jo-jo saku smith of the Rai descent, and the connoisseurship of his work follows from his being a fine but residually attributed name rather than a celebrated one. Eleven of his blades stand on the designated record, all at the Juyo level and none raised to the higher tiers, so that there is no patrimony of his locked permanently into museum and shrine holdings. None of the designated blades carries a recorded daimyo provenance, and current ownership is largely unrecorded, so the honest account is that he is met not through a famous transmission but through the blades themselves: the broad mumei o-suriage katana with their Hon'ami gold attributions, and the signed tanto and small wakizashi in which his hand can be read directly. A collector encounters him as one of the more findable of the Rai-descended names, since his blades sit in the tradeable designation tiers rather than beyond reach, yet a signed example with its three-character mei intact is the rarer thing, the first generation's almost never seen. What such a blade offers is a precise and legible specimen of the Yamashiro Rai manner carried into Settsu and worked a degree busier, the best of which the judges have called a fine piece standing out even within the Kuninaga attribution.

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