Two of Yoshikage's signed blades carry a date, one to Enbun 2 (1357) and one to Ōan 7 (1374), and on these few inscribed pieces the whole of his record rests. He is a Bizen Osafune smith of the Nanbokuchō period, counted among the makers the published sources call Sōden-Bizen (相伝備前), the Osafune hands who worked the Sōshū-influenced manner in Bizen beside the lines of Kanemitsu and Nagayoshi. His lineage has long been argued. The older books made him a second son of Kagemitsu, or a pupil of Kanemitsu, or a pupil of Nagayoshi; in recent years, on the close resemblance of his workmanship and the distinctive way he cut his signature with the reverse chisel, the prevailing view is that he was "a collateral Osafune smith of the same kin as Chikakage and Morikage"[[c:1]]. The sword registers transmit two generations, a first toward the end of Kamakura and a second around Jōji, and authentic signed works are so scarce that the two are not easily separated.
The hand the published sources describe is a small-patterned, varied midare rather than the orthodox Osafune clove-flower. Over the jigane he tempers a suguha base into which he mixes ko-gunome, ko-chōji, angular kakubaru-ba and pointed togariba, the elements kept small and the intervals of the undulation tight, so that the line reads as densely animated yet modest in pattern. Within it run abundant ashi, saka-ashi and yō, the temper nioi-dominant with ko-nie that gathers somewhat in clusters, with kinsuji and sunagashi worked through and a slight yubashiri-like tobiyaki intermingled. The nioiguchi tends to subside, and it is exactly there that the judges locate him: in the Sōden-Bizen group, the published sources hold, "where the hamon keeps to small clusters and the nioiguchi subsides lies the point that marks out Yoshikage"[[c:2]]. The bōshi runs midare-komi with a pointed tendency and hakikake, on one Tokubetsu Jūyō katana turning at the tip in a pointed manner that the commentary names as conspicuously his own.
The jigane is the constant beneath that quiet temper. It is an itame mixed with mokume that tends to stand, a hada-dachi into which fine ji-nie settles densely, chikei enters well, and a jifu-toned texture appears in places, with a midare-utsuri standing in the surface. On the broadest blades the ji-nie is laid mijin, dust-fine and thick, and the chikei runs strong. This strongly nie-laden forging, with its frequent kinsuji and sunagashi, is what the prewar connoisseurs read when they placed him without hesitation among the Sōshū-den smiths, and what the modern judges mean when they say a blade "manifests the working range of Sōden-Bizen."
His recognized prime is the broad Nanbokuchō blade in the height-of-period shape: wide in body with little taper from base to tip, the kasane often notably thick, ending in a large point, and surviving for the most part ō-suriage and mumei. Against this stand the rare signed pieces, which skew quieter: one Jūyō tachi is essentially suguha-chō, subdued in workmanship, that the published sources keep precisely because authentic signatures are so few and it is valuable as reference. A separate register is the naginata-naoshi, blades reshaped from the polearm, for the published sources call him "an old master of the naginata"[[c:3]] and a large share of his attributions take that form, wide-bodied and shallow in sori, the shinogi-ji planed down, sometimes keeping traces of the naginata-hi and soe-hi on the tang. The two dated signatures, of Enbun and Ōan, fix this varied output securely in the mid-to-late Nanbokuchō.
What separates Yoshikage from his neighbours is what the judges name on his own blades. Within Sōden-Bizen his temper is read as "neither Kanemitsu's nor Nagayoshi's"[[c:4]]: smaller in pattern than the orthodox Osafune chōji, more subdued in the nioiguchi than the showier Chōgi hand, and laid over a jigane that carries a step more sunagashi and kinsuji than the Kanemitsu work. His signature, cut with the reverse chisel, is read in the same breath as his kantei, the commentary treating "the distinctive signature cut with the reverse chisel"[[c:5]] as one of the marks that fixes both his hand and his kinship to the collateral Osafune line. He stands, in short, as the quiet, nie-laden member of the Sōden-Bizen circle, the one whose interest lies in restraint rather than in flame.
For the collector Yoshikage is a scarce name on which little can ever change hands. Fujishiro grades him Jō saku. He has no National Treasures; his record runs instead through two Important Cultural Properties, one a signed wakizashi dated Ōan 7 held at Tanzan Shrine in Nara, the other a signed tachi, together with three Tokubetsu Jūyō and some sixty Jūyō blades, and the prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin. Of recorded whereabouts his blades pass through long-held hands rather than the open market: a tachi once in the Date family, another transmitted in the Arisugawa-no-miya house, a katana whose tang bears the gold-inlaid possession inscription of Ōkubo Shirōzaemon-no-jō. The published commentary singles out his finest naginata-naoshi as "foremost among works by the same hand"[[c:6]]. With reliably signed pieces extremely few and most survivors ō-suriage and mumei, a Yoshikage in private hands comes to light only from time to time, and seldom near the top of his range; when one does, it is a quiet document of how the Sōshū manner was carried into late Osafune.
