The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

by Edmund de Waal

  After so many years of living with only the contents of a suitcase or two, this was Iggie’s first house. He was forty-two and had lived in Vienna and Frankfurt and Paris and New York and Hollywood, and in army billets across France and Germany – and in Léopoldville – but had never been able to shut a door in his own house until this first liberated, exhilarating spring in Japan.

  A summer party in Senzoku, Tokyo, 1951

  The house had been built in the 1920s, with an octagonal dining-room and a balcony overlooking the lake, perfect for drinks parties. You stepped out of the sitting-room onto a large, flat boulder and then down into the garden with its clipped pines and azaleas, a terrace of stones arranged in a careful random pattern, and a moss garden. It was the kind of house that the young Japanese diplomat Ichiro Kawasaki described: ‘In pre-war years a university professor or army colonel could afford to build such a house and live there himself. Today the owners find these houses so expensive to maintain that they must either sell them or rent them to foreigners.’

  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 is 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 were 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 this netsuke carved by Soko. The slow, emphatic turtles climbing over each other on the edge of the temple pond are your Tomokazu netsuke. You are not, perhaps, meeting monks and pedlars and fishermen, let alone tigers, on the way to your office in Marunouchi, but the man at the noodle-stand at the train station has the same permanent scowl as the disappointed rat-catcher.

  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-miyage, 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 tokonoma, 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 Palai
s Ephrussi in Vienna, collected by his grandfather in the heady years of the family’s ascendancy during the 1870s. A picture of an Arab boy by a painter whom Ignace supported on his travels around the Middle East. A couple of Austrian landscapes. A little Dutch painting of some contented cows that once hung on a back corridor. In his dining-room, above a sideboard, is a melancholy picture of a soldier with a musket in a penumbrous wood, which used to be in his father’s dressing-room at the end of the corridor alongside the vast Leda and the Swan and the bust of Herr Wessel.

  Here are the bits of restitution wrung out of Vienna by Elisabeth, hanging alongside Iggie’s Japanese scrolls. This, too, is a bit of fraternisation: Ringstrassenstil in Japan.

  These photographs are vivid: they radiate happiness. Iggie had a capacity to get along, wherever he was – there are even snaps of him and soldier friends during the war, playing with an adopted puppy in a ruined bunker. In Japan he is expansive to his Japanese and Western friends in this eclectic setting.

  His happiness was compounded when he moved to another beautiful house and garden in a more convenient location in Azabu. He hated the idea of this area – a gaijin colony full of diplomats – but the house was high up, with a series of interconnecting rooms and with a garden falling away in front of it, full of white camellias.

  It was big enough to build a separate apartment for his young friend Jiro Sugiyama. They had met in July 1952. ‘I ran into an old classmate outside the Marunouchi building who introduced me to his boss Leo Ephrussi…Two weeks after that, I had a call from Leo – I always called him Leo – inviting me to have dinner with him. We had lobster thermidor on the roof garden of the Tokyo Kaikan…and through him I got a job at an old Mitsui company, Sumitomo.’ They were to be together for forty-one years.

  Jiro was twenty-six, slight and handsome, fluent in English and a lover of Fats Waller and Brahms. When they met he had just returned from three years studying at an American university on a scholarship. His passport from the Administration Office Occupation Forces was stamped no. 19. Jiro remembered his anxiety about how he would be treated in America, and how the newspapers wrote it up: ‘a young Japanese boy off to America in a grey flannel suit and white Oxford shirt’.

  Jiro had grown up as the middle child of five siblings in a merchant family that made lacquered wooden clogs in Shizuoka, the city between Tokyo and Yokohama: ‘our family made the very best, painted geta with urushi lacquer on them. My grandfather Tokujiro made our fortune out of geta…We had a large traditional house with ten people working in the shop, and they all had quarters to live in.’ They were a prosperous and entrepreneurial family, and in 1944 Jiro, aged eighteen, had been sent to the preparatory school for Waseda University in Tokyo and then on to the university itself. Too young to fight, he had seen Tokyo obliterated around him.

  Jiro, my Japanese uncle, has been part of my life for as long as Iggie. We sat together in the study of his Tokyo apartment and he talked of those early days together. They would leave the city on Friday nights and ‘have our weekends around Tokyo, in Hakone, Ise, Kyoto, Nikko, or stay in ryokan and onsen and have good food. He had a yellow DeSoto convertible with a black top. The first thing after leaving our luggage at the ryokan Leo always wanted to do, was to go to antique shops – Chinese pots, Japanese pots, furniture…’ And during the week they would meet up after work. ‘He’d say “Meet me at the Shiseido restaurant for beef curry rice, or for crabmeat croquette.” Or we’d meet at the bar of the Imperial. There were so many parties at home. We’d have whisky together late at night after everyone had gone, with opera on the gramophone.’

  Their life was Kodachrome – I can see that yellow-and-black car glistening like a hornet on a dusty road in the Japanese alps, the pinkness of the croquette framed on white.

  They explored Japan together, travelling to an inn that specialised in river trout one weekend; to a town on the coast for an autumn matsuri, a jostling parade of red-and-gold festival floats. They went to exhibitions of Japanese art at the museums in Ueno Park. And to the first travelling exhibitions of Impressionism from European museums, where the queues stretched from the entrance to the gates. They came out from seeing Pissarro, and Tokyo looked like Paris in the rain.

  Iggie and Jiro on a boat in the Inland Sea, Japan, 1954

  But music was closest to the heart of their life together. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had become extremely popular during the war. The Ninth – Daiku as it was known colloquially – became an entrenched part of New Year, with huge choirs singing the ‘Ode to Joy’. Under the Occupation, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra had been partly sponsored by the authorities with programmes selected from requests by the troops. And now, in the early 1950s, there were regional orchestras across Japan. Schoolchildren with satchels on their backs clutched violin cases. Foreign orchestras started to visit, and Jiro and Iggie would go to one concert after another: Rossini, Wagner and Brahms. They saw Rigoletto together, and Iggie recalled that it was the first opera he had seen with his mother in their box in Vienna during the First World War, and that she had cried at the final curtain.

  And so this is the fourth resting-place of the netsuke. It is a vitrine in a sitting-room in post-war Tokyo looking out across a bed of clipped camellias, where the netsuke are washed late at night by waves of Gounod’s Faust, played loud.

  32. WHERE DID YOU GET THEM?

  The arrival of the Americans meant that Japan had, once again, become a country to plunder, a country full of attractive objects, pairs of Satsuma vases, kimono robes, lacquer and gilt swords, folding screens with peonies, chests with bronze handles. Japanese stuff was so cheap, so abundant. Newsweek’s first report on Occupied Japan on 24th September 1945 was headlined ‘Yanks Start Kimono Hunt, Learn What Geishas Doesn’t’ (sic). That blunt and cryptic headline, joining souvenirs and girls, sums up the Occupation. The New York Times later that year reported ‘A Sailor Goes on a Shopping Spree’: if you were a GI there was very little else to buy, after you had spent what you could on cigarettes, beer and girls.

  A successful après-guerre opened a small money-exchange booth on the pier at Yokohama, converting dollars into yen for the first American soldiers. He also bought and resold American cigarettes. But, crucially, the third part of his business was selling ‘cheap Japanese bric-a-brac, such as bronze Buddha images. Brass candleholders, and incense burners, which he had salvaged from bombed-out areas. Being great novelties in those days, these curio items sold like proverbial hotcakes.’

  How did you know what to buy? All soldiers ‘had to suffer an hour in combat subjects [such] as Japanese flower arrangement, incense burning, marriage, dress, tea ceremonies, and fishing with cormorants,’ John LaCerda acidly commented in The Conqueror Comes to Tea: Japan under MacArthur, published in 1946. For the more serious there were the new guides to Japanese arts and craft, printed on grey paper so thin that it feels like tissue. The Japan Travel Bureau published its guides ‘to give to the passing tourists and other foreigners interested in Japan a basic knowledge of various phases of Japanese culture’. They included, amongst other subjects: Floral Art of Japan, Hiroshige, Kimono (Japanese Dress), Tea Cult of Japan, Bonsai (Miniature Potted Trees). And, of course, Netsuke: A Miniature Art of Japan.

  From the bric-a-brac salesmen on the pier at Yokohama to the men with a handful of lacquers on a white cloth sitting outside a temple, it was difficult not to encounter Japan for sale. Everything was old, or labelled as old. You could buy an ashtray, a lighter or tea towel with images of geisha, Mount Fuji, wisteria. Japan was a series of snapshots, of postcards coloured like brocade, cherry blossom as pink as candy-floss. Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton, cliché jumbled up against cliché. But you could just as easily buy an ‘exotic remnant of the Age of the Daimyos’. As Time put it in the article ‘Yen for Art’, writing about the Hauge brothers, who had amassed an exceptional collection of Japanese art:

  Of the countless GIs who spent a tour of duty in Japan, few failed to load up on souvenirs. But only a
handful of Americans realised what a collector’s paradise was within their reach…The Hauges got off to a flying start with the whirlwind of inflation that swept the Japanese yen from 15 all the way to 360 to the dollar. At the same time the Hauges were reaping a paper harvest of yen, Japanese families, hit with postwar taxes, were living an ‘onionskin’ existence, peeling off long-treasured art works to stay afloat.

  Onionskin, bamboo shoots. They were images of vulnerability, tenderness and tears. They were also images of undressing. It paralleled the stories so avidly told and retold by Philippe Sichel and the Goncourts in Paris during the first febrile rush of japonisme of how you could buy anything, how you could buy anyone.

  Iggie might be expatriate, but he was still an Ephrussi. He too started to collect. On his trips with Jiro he bought Chinese ceramics – a pair of Tang Dynasty horses with arching backs, celadon-green dishes with swimming fish, fifteenth-century blue-and-white porcelain. He bought Japanese golden screens with crimson peonies, scrolls with misty landscapes, early Buddhist sculpture. You could buy a Ming Dynasty bowl for a carton of Lucky Strikes, Iggie told me, guiltily. He showed it to me. It has a perfect high ring, if you tap it gently. It has peonies painted in blue under a milky glaze. I wonder who had to sell it.

  It was during these years of the Occupation that netsuke became ‘collectables’. The Japan Travel Bureau guide on netsuke, published in 1951, records ‘valuable help given by Rear Admiral Benton W. Dekker, former commander of the US Fleet Activities at Yokosuka, Japan and a most devoted connoisseur of Netsuke’. This guide, in print for thirty years, gave its view of netsuke in the clearest way:

  The Japanese are by nature clever with their fingers. This deftness may be attributed to their inclination to small things, developed in them because they live in a small insular country, and are not continental in character. Their habit of eating their meals with chopsticks, which they learn to handle cleverly from early childhood, may also be regarded as one of the causes that made them thus deft-handed. Such a special characteristic is responsible at once for the merits and demerits of Japanese art. The people lack an aptitude for producing anything on a large scale or deep and substantial. But they display their nature in finishing their work with delicate skill and scrupulous execution.