The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [121]
I’m looking at the clutch of small, round-cornered Kodachrome prints of this first house of Iggie’s in Tokyo. ‘Zoning is a subject to which Japanese city planners have given little thought. It is quite common to find a group of slummy wooden shacks of labourers immediately adjacent to the palatial residence of a millionaire.’ That is the case here, though the rebuilding of the shacks to the left and the right are being done in concrete rather than wood and paper. This neighbourhood is starting again: temples and shrines, the local market, the bicycle-repair man and the cluster of shops at the end of the road – more a track than a road – where you can buy fat white daikon radishes laid out in rows, and cabbages, and little else.
We start on the front doorstep with Iggie, hand in pocket, tie clip glinting on a green silk tie. He is a broad man now, given to keeping a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. This is something that the youngsters in his office have started to copy, the coordinating pocket handkerchief–necktie combo. Today he is in brogues. He looks a little squirearchical. He could be in the Cotswolds if it was not for the pruned pines that flank him and the green tiles of the roof. We move inside into a long corridor and turn left, where the cook Mr Haneda is in his whites, eyes closed against the flash, leaning on the new cooker, chef’s hat set jauntily on the back of his head. A bottle of Heinz ketchup is the only food in view, Kodachrome scarlet against all the blindingly clean enamel.
Back in the corridor we move through an open doorway, under a Noh mask and into the sitting-room. The ceiling is of slatted wood. All the lamps are on. Objects are displayed on spare, dark, clean-lined Korean and Chinese furniture alongside comfortable low sofas, occasional tables and lamps, and ashtrays and cigarette boxes. A wooden Buddha from Kyoto sits on a Korean chest, a hand raised in blessing.
The bamboo bar holds an impressive quantity of liquor, none of which I can identify. It is a house made for parties. Parties with small children on their knees, and women in kimonos, and presents. Parties with men in dark suits seated round small tables, loquacious with whisky. Parties at New Year with cut boughs of pine trees hanging from the ceiling, and parties under the cherry trees, and once – in a spirit of poetry – a firefly-viewing party.
There is lots and lots of fraternisation here: Japanese and American and European friends, sushi and beer served by Mrs Kaneko, the maid in her uniform. It is Liberty Hall, again.
It is also a house with panache. There is none of the clutter of his childhood in the Palais: it is a dramatic interior of golden screens and scrolls, paintings and Chinese pots created as a new home for the netsuke.
For right in the centre of this house, in the centre of Iggie’s life, are the netsuke. Iggie designed a glass case for them. It has a patterned paper on the walls behind it, a pale-blue pattern of chrysanthemums. Not only are the 264 netsuke back in Japan, but they are back on show in a salon. They are placed by Iggie on three long glass shelves. There are hidden lights so that at dusk the vitrine glows with all the gradations of cream, bone and ivory. At night they can light the whole room.
Here the netsuke became Japanese again.
They lose their strangeness. They are surprisingly accurate renditions of the food you eat: clams, octopus, peaches, persimmon, bamboo shoots. The bundle of kindling that is kept by the kitchen door is knotted like