SOLD

Tracked across 76 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the school

Awataguchi School粟田口派

The steel is the first thing one learns to read in Awataguchi work: a *ko-itame* kneaded so tight that the surface takes on the pear-skin sheen the texts name *nashiji-hada*, the *ji-nie* dusted over it fine and even, slender *chikei* threading through, the whole carrying a moist luster (潤い) and a clarity that recurs in notice after notice. This is the steel of the early Yamashiro tradition at its summit. The forge stood at the foot of the Awataguchi slope in Kyoto, on the highway running toward Omi, and a community of smiths already worked there by the early Kamakura period; the tale collection *Uji Shui Monogatari* attests their presence, so this is a house with a documented place in the literature of its own century. The school is conventionally founded on the six brothers, Kunitomo the eldest, then Hisakuni, Kuniyasu, Kunikiyo, Arikuni and Kunitsuna, sons of the founder Kunika (also given as Kuniie). Kunitomo, Hisakuni and Kuniyasu were summoned as *goban-kaji* to forge on rotation at the cloistered court of the Retired Emperor Go-Toba, and Hisakuni is even transmitted as a teacher to the sovereign; that imperial patronage is the reason a slender *tachi* with so quiet a temper carries the authority it does. What binds the house across four generations is restraint married to refinement. Over the *nashiji-hada* the brothers set a calm *suguha* leaning into a shallow *notare*, mixed with *ko-midare*, *ko-gunome* and *ko-choji*, the *nioiguchi* tight and bright, *ko-ashi* and *yo* entering, *kinsuji* and *sunagashi* running within the *ha*; the *boshi* turns in a refined *ko-maru* that very often sweeps with *hakikake*. This is the opposite pole from the clove-flower flamboyance of contemporary Bizen, an edge whose interest lies in the activity within rather than the height of the pattern. Within that shared vocabulary the members are told apart by habit. Kunitomo and Kuniyasu hold to the compressed *ko-midare* of the founding generation, their *nioiguchi* clouding into *urumi*; Kuniyasu's linked *ko-gunome* picks him out alone within the school. Kunitsuna is the divergence, a robust *o-itame* standing prominently over thick *ji-nie*, with conspicuously strong *ha-nie* that leans toward the Sagami manner about to be born. The later course runs through Norikuni, the bridge generation, into the *tanto* age of Kuniyoshi and Yoshimitsu, where the temper settles into bright *suguha* in fine *ko-nie*. Kuniyoshi's tell is the *nijuba*, the doubled (at times trebled) line along the *ha*; Yoshimitsu's is the linear *kuisagari* dropping of *nie* into the *ji* beneath the *boshi*, his *suguha* a narrow *hoso-suguha* under a bright *nioiguchi*. For the collector the school divides into work that can be studied and work that can be owned. Its summit, Toshiro Yoshimitsu, crowns the close of the line; paired with Shintogo Kunimitsu of Sagami as a master of the *tanto* and a virtuoso of *suguha*, and ranked in the Edo period with Masamune and Go among the Three Great Works under Heaven, he is a smith met in the great collections rather than possessed, his signed *tanto* the standard against which every attribution is measured. His teacher Kuniyoshi, whose *nashiji-hada* the texts name outright, is by Awataguchi measure not wholly beyond reach, his *o-suriage mumei* katana anchored on the doubled line. The house also seeded the eastern tradition: Kunitsuna's transmitted descent runs on to Shintogo Kunimitsu, the de facto founder of Soshu, whose own refined *nashiji* steel passes for Awataguchi until the *chikei* and *kinsuji* betray it, and from whose quiet *nie*-laden *suguha* Yukimitsu, Masamune and Norishige drew the *nie-midare* of the mature tradition. The refined *nie-suguha* the brothers fixed was likewise the wellspring the Rai masters drew from, the two hands sitting so close in the eye that gold-inlaid Rai attributions appear on blades grouped with Hisakuni. To *kantei* an Awataguchi blade is to read the pear-skin steel first, then the quiet *nie*-laden *suguha*, then the swept *boshi*, and to know which brother or pupil the habits name; to acquire one, of any generation, is among the scarcest encounters early Yamashiro affords.

Nihonto.com

nihonto.com