09/04/2011

264 netsuke

264 wood and ivory carvings none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was stunned when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the netsuke, they unlocked a story far larger than he could have imagined. And this is the story he shares in the amazingly original memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. A Hidden Inheritance, first published in London UK in September 2010, whose North American edition just appeared in Canada.



The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at the time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Charles’s passion was collecting, and the netsuke, bought when Japanese objects were all the rage of the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna.

Later, three children – including a young Ignace – played with the collection as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussi to the blink of oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the Jewish Question), one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid – and hidden in a straw mattress”.

Edmund de Waal traces the network of a remarkable family in the heart of a tumultuous century, in Paris, Rue de Monceau, and in different cities in Europe. In an elegant and simple prose as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand, and which, by a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan…

A lovely read.  

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