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To Occidentals it may seem that a difference in polish is only a matter of formula and application. In point of fact, polish is a very important process in the creation of a fine netsuke. It comprises a series of boilings, dryings and rubbings with various ingredients and materials that are carefully guarded secrets. A fine polish requires three or four days of laborious patience and conscientious care. The thick, rich, brown polish of the younger Toyozaku, although fine, is not of such eclipsing excellence.

So I take out my tiger with the yellow-horn inlaid eyes by the younger Toyokazu of the Tamba school. This carver worked in fine, dense boxwood and was well known for the mobility he achieved in his animals. Mine has a striped tail that is a whiplash up his back. I take it out for a day or two, and once, stupidly, leave it on my notes in the fifth-floor stacks (Biography K–S) at the London Library while I go for coffee. But he is still there when I get back, my non-eclipsing tiger with his glowing eyes in his rich, brown scowling face.

He is pure menace. He has seen off the other readers.

Coda

TOKYO, ODESSA, LONDON 2001–2009

35. JIRO

I am back in Tokyo, walking up from the underground station past the isotonic drink machines. It is September and I haven’t been here for a couple of years. The machines are new. Some things change slowly in Tokyo. There are still the few raggedy wooden houses with their washing pegged out next to the silvery condominiums. Mrs X at the sushi restaurant is cleaning the steps.

I stay with Jiro, as I always do. He is in his early eighties, busy. He goes to the Opera, of course, and the theatre. And he has spent a few years going to a pottery class and making tea-bowls and small dishes for soy sauce. Jiro has left Iggie’s apartment unchanged since he died fifteen years ago. The pens are still in their holder and the blotter is still central on the desk. This is where I’m staying.

I’ve brought a tape-recorder and we fiddle with it for a while and then give up, watch the news and have a drink and some toast and pâté. I am here for three days to ask him more about his life with Iggie, and check that I have not remembered anything incorrectly in the story of the netsuke. I want to make sure that I have the story of Iggie and Jiro’s first meeting correct, the name of the street where they had their first house together. It is one of those conversations that needs to happen, but I’m worried about its formality.

I’m jet-lagged and awake at three-thirty in the morning. I make myself coffee. I run my hands along Iggie’s bookcases, the old children’s books from Vienna, complete runs of Len Deighton next to Proust, trying to find something to read. I take down some old copies of Architectural Digest, which I love for their glamorous adverts for Chryslers and Chivas Regal whisky, and I find sandwiched between June and July 1966 an envelope containing very old documents, official-looking, in Russian. I walk round and round. I’m not sure I can cope with any more surprising envelopes.

I look up at the pictures salvaged from the Palais, which used to hang in Viktor’s study at the end of the corridor, and at the gold screen with the irises on it that Iggie bought in Kyoto in the 1950s. I pick up an old Chinese bowl with deeply carved petals. The incisions hold the green glaze. I suppose I’ve known it for thirty years now and it still feels good.

This whole room has been part of my life for so long that I can’t watch it, distance myself from it. I can’t inventory it, as I did Charles’s rooms in the rue de Monceau and the avenue d’Iéna, or Emmy’s dressing-room in Vienna.

I fall asleep at dawn.

Jiro makes good breakfasts. We have excellent coffee and pawpaw and tiny pains au chocolat from one of the Ginza bakeries. And then we take a deep breath and he starts to tell me for the first time about the day the war ended, how on 15th August 1945 he was recuperating from a slight case of pleurisy and was bored. He had come up to