The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [122]
The netsuke share their imagery with the Japanese scrolls and gilded screens across the room. They have something to talk with in this room, unlike Charles’s Moreaus and Renoirs, or Emmy’s silver and glass scent bottles on her dressing-table. They have always been objects to be picked up and handled – now they become part of another world of handled objects. Not only are they familiar in material (ivory and boxwood are gripped every day as chopsticks), but their shapes are deeply embedded. One whole type of netsuke, the manju netsuke, is named after the small, rounded beancurd sweet cakes eaten daily with tea or given as o-miyagi, the small gifts you present if you go anywhere in Japan. Manju are dense and surprisingly heavy, but they give slightly as you pick them up. When you pick up a manju netsuke your thumb expects the same sensation.
Many of Iggie’s Japanese friends had never seen netsuke before, let alone handled them. Jiro just remembered his grandfather, the entrepreneur, dressed in his dark dense grey kimono for weddings and funerals. Five heraldic motifs on neck and cuffs and sleeves, white split-toed socks and geta or wooden clogs, the wide obi belt in its stiff knot round his waist, and a netsuke – some animal? a rat? – hanging on its cord. But netsuke had disappeared from daily use eighty years beforehand in the early Meiji period, when kimonos for men had been discouraged. At Iggie’s parties, with glasses of whisky and plates of edamame, crunchy green-bean pods, scattered on the tables, the cases were opened. Netsuke were picked up again, exclaimed over, handed round and enjoyed. And friends explain them to you. As it is 1951, the Year of the Hare in the zodiac, you hold the netsuke made from the clearest ivory in the whole collection, and it is explained that it gleams because it is a lunar hare racing across the waves, illuminated by moonlight.
The last time netsuke had been handled in this social way was in Paris by Edmond de Goncourt, by Degas and Renoir in Charles Ephrussi’s salon of contemporary good taste, a conversation between an eroticised otherness and new art.
Now they are back home in Japan, the netsuke are a memory of conversations with grandparents about calligraphy, or poetry, or the shamisen. For Iggie’s Japanese guests, they are part of a lost world, made more astringent by the bleakness of post-war life. Look, the netsuke reprove, at this wealth of time there used to be.
Here they are also part of a new version of Japonisme. Iggie’s house has its counterpart in 1950s international-design magazines with their emphasis on the layering of Japanese style into the contemporary home. Japan can be referenced by a signature Buddha, a screen, a rough country jar in the new folk-craft trend. Architectural Digest is full of residences in America with these objects alongside the gold leaf in the hall, a wall of mirrors, the use of raw silk on the walls, vast plate-glass windows and abstract paintings.
In this Tokyo house of an adopted American there is a tokonama, the alcove that is so important in traditional houses, a space held apart from the rest of the house by a pillar of untreated timber. Country grasses are arranged in a basket near a scroll painting and a Japanese bowl. Contemporary Japanese pictures of etiolated figures and horses by Fukui, a favourite young painter, hang on the walls. Iggie’s catholic collection of books on Japanese art, Proust up against James Thurber and stacks and stacks of American crime, range the shelves.
But here amongst the Japanese art are also a few paintings from the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, collected by his grandfather in the heady years of the family’s ascendancy during the 1870s.