The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
by Edmund De Waal, © 2010
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Hardbound: 351 pp

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines netsuke as the Japanese word for “a small and often intricately carved toggle (as of wood, ivory, or metal) used to fasten a small container to a kimono sash.” While many are simple folk carvings, the finest netsuke are an art unto themselves, expressive, tiny sculptures treasured by collectors around the world.

“How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. [As in:] I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?”

De Waal is a descendant of the Ephrussi family, a rich and powerful family of Eastern European Jews that, in the mid-nineteenth century, moved from Odessa, where they were grain traders, to Vienna and Paris. There they diversified their interests into banking and construction and other fields, acquiring enormous wealth. They were also patrons of the arts, and their connections to various artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Degas, Renoir, Rilke are just a few) will intrigue any art lover or historian.

De Waal is himself a noted potter, living in England. While a teenager, he spent some time in Japan on a student exchange, studying with a master potter. After his return to England, he put in seven years of hard work learning and refining his art, but when he returned to Japan on a fellowship, he renewed his acquaintance with his great Uncle Iggie, who had wound up in Japan shortly after WW2. Iggie was at that time the owner of the vitrine and netsuke. Iggie lived in an apartment adjoining the apartment of his partner, Jiro Sujiama, and when he died in 1994, he left the vitrine and its contents to Jiro, who in turn left it to De Waal.

Once in his possession, the netsuke began to nudge at De Waal’s curiosity. He started carrying one in his pocket, a carving of a very ripe medlar fruit, made out of chestnut wood in Edo in the late eighteenth century, long before Japan was opened to foreign trade. Made with incredible art and craft, the small object triggered De Waal’s desire to trace the story of the netsuke, and to understand the people who have owned and cared for them.

He knew that they were bought in Paris in the 1870’s by his great grandfather’s cousin, a bon vivant named Charles Ephrussi. They traveled to Vienna, when Charles gave them as a wedding present to De Waal’s great grandfather, Baron Viktor von Ephrussi, (Iggie’s father) at the turn of the century. De Wall’s grandmother, Elisabeth, remembered how her sisters and brothers loved taking the little “hand sculptures” out of their cabinet to play with them.

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