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About the maker

Kozori Nariie成家

Nariie worked at Osafune in Bizen in the later Nanbokucho period, and the dated swords that fix his hand carry year-signatures running from Bunna and Joji through Koan, Oan and Eiwa, with one wakizashi signed and dated Koan 2 (1362). The biographical records make him a descendant of Kagehide, the younger brother of Mitsutada, but the published sources set that pedigree aside and place him by his workmanship among the Kozori smiths, the Osafune hands of the later fourteenth century who stand outside the direct line of Kanemitsu. The term Kozori is itself loosely drawn, the NBTHK allows, a convenience that gathers the late Nanbokucho smiths not tied as pupils to the Kanemitsu workshop. What the commentary returns to, blade after blade, is the relation to Kanemitsu read in both his manner and the script of his signature, a relation it declines to settle: 「兼光との関係も考えられ、今後の検討が俟たれるところである」, that the connection is to be considered and the matter awaits further study. He is a smith known almost entirely from o-suriage mumei katana, his name reaching the published record at Important Cultural Property and twenty Juyo Token. The hand that distinguishes him is a gunome-based midareba that at first glance is taken for Kanemitsu and is told from him on a closer look. Over the body he tempers small ko-gunome, ko-notare and pointed togariba, square-shouldered gunome and waist-open gunome also entering, the whole running, in the recurring phrase of the published sources, small and crowded (kozumu). The institution describes his favoured temper plainly, 「のたれや互の目交じりの乱れ刃を得意とし」, a midareba of notare and gunome mixed; what individualizes it is the variety of ha packed into a small pattern rather than any single shape. The judges set this against Kanemitsu directly. On one Juyo katana the commentary writes that the blade resembles Kanemitsu at a glance, then adds 「焼刃の互の目がこずむ傾向が窺われ」, that the gunome of the temper is seen to crowd, and finds in that crowding the mark by which it is to be read as Nariie. The work falls a little short of Kanemitsu's breadth, the sources repeat, though not of his skill. His jigane is an itame carrying mokume and nagare-hada, the grain standing a little, with ji-nie attaching fine and chikei entering of an irregular changing-steel cast, sometimes coarse altered steel running thick through the surface, sometimes a jifu tone crossing it. A midare-utsuri rises, pale, the Bizen reflection of the period; on the most crowded small-pattern blades it reads instead as a straight utsuri, and the ji is carried as much by the standing itame and that kawarigane chikei as by the reflection. Through the yakiba ashi and yo enter well, the temper is nioi-prevailing with ko-nie, and kinsuji and sunagashi play finely along it. The boshi runs into the midare and points, returning to a ko-maru or burning out in a yakizume, hakikake brushing the turn. A bo-hi, on several blades carried with a soe-hi or beside the trace of a bonji, runs through the body. The sugata is the broad shape of the late Nanbokucho: a wide body with little taper from machi to point, a large kissaki, the curvature shallow, the build heavy in the hand, most often reached by o-suriage that has left the blade mumei. The oeuvre divides on the nakago. A small group of ubu pieces keeps the original shape and the long signature with its year-date, the koshizori tachi and the broad, suriage-shortened hira-zukuri wakizashi among them, and these are the documentary anchor for everything else. The far larger part is o-suriage and mumei, attributed to him by the workmanship alone, and it is on these that the kantei argument is made and remade: a blade is read first as Kanemitsu's school, then resolved to Nariie by the smaller, more cluttered pattern, the mixture of many ha-types, and a touch of the rustic in the ji and ha. The year-dates carry their own weight in the scholarship. The records give him dates from Bunna and Koan that run relatively early for a Kozori smith, and the NBTHK marks them, treating the Koan 2 wakizashi as a good document and noting that such comparatively early signatures bear on where, within the loose Kozori grouping, his work should sit. Within that grouping the published sources rank him high. They hold his skill equal to or above that of Masamitsu, a Kanemitsu pupil of his own generation, 「彼の技術は同年代の兼光一門の政光に比して優るとも劣らず」, and on one blade call him a representative smith of the Kozori group at the height of the Nanbokucho period. The comparison that frames him is therefore never a borrowing but a measure: he is placed beside Kanemitsu to be distinguished from him, his own typical traits leading the reading. His midare crowds where Kanemitsu's opens; his ji takes a changing-steel chikei and a pale utsuri where the Kanemitsu line runs cleaner; his temper gathers many small ha where theirs is more uniform. These are the features the judges name as his, and the resemblance survives in the prose only as the thing they are correcting. The Fujishiro appraisal places Nariie at Chu-jo saku, and his designated record stands at one Important Cultural Property and twenty Juyo Token, with no National Treasure or Tokubetsu Juyo among them. The Important Cultural Property is patrimony, held outside the market as such designations are; the Juyo blades, almost all o-suriage mumei katana, are what a private collector might realistically hope to meet, and they come to hand only from time to time. Provenance is thinly recorded for his work: one katana is documented as having been carried by Imai Sadahiro, the castle elder of the Nishio domain in Mikawa, at the battle of Toba-Fushimi in the Boshin War, and descended with its red stone-grain lacquer scabbard mounting. Beyond that the owners of his blades are largely unrecorded, and what survives is best described as held in long-private hands. For a Kozori master read always against Kanemitsu, a signed and dated example is the rarer find, the o-suriage mumei katana the more usual one, and either is encountered with patience rather than at will.

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