ESSAY ON THE PREFACE OF THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES BY EDMUND WAAL

In 1991, seven British young people from different professional fields took part

in a program of a Japanese foundation receiving a two-year scholarship. These

teenager students were given the first year of the program a grounding in the

Japanese language still in the UK and the second year in a language school in Japan.

Between these guys, there was the writer Edmund de Waal (b. 1964), a British

ceramicist descendent of a Jew family (the Ephrussi) who, since the late 18th century,

having started in Berdichev (Ukraine),have spread around cities like Odessa, Vienna,

Tokyo, Amsterdam, Paris, Cambridge and London. Edmund has been making pots since

he was a child. According to his own words “most of my schoolboy afternoons were

spent in a pottery workshop, and I left school early at seventeen to become

apprenticed to an austere man, a devotee of English potter Bernard Leach”.

Before talking about his family’s curious story, in his Preface De Waal speaks a

bit about his experience in Japan – what looks to be a watershed in his art. In fact, the

main topic of this book is the interesting and larger collection of netsuke, traditional

Japanese miniature statues, which has belonged to the Ephrussis for five generations,

since 1871. After finishing his apprenticeship in Japan, he came back to the UK and,

whilst studying English literature at university, he worked during seven years in a grim

inner city of Wales before to return to Japan. This second time in Japan seemed to be

marked by the figure of his great-uncle Iggie (Ignace Ephrussi, 1906-1994), who lived in

Japan for more than half of his life and housed the netsuke collection.

During this time living again in Japan, Edmund worked on a book about Leach,

his former master. Bernard Leach has been a close friend of Yanagi Soetsu, a

philosopher, art historian and poet. Yanagi’s work was housed in the Japanese Folk

Crafts Museum, where two afternoons a week Edmund went to work in his researches.

According to him, “it was to be a covert book on Japonisme the way in which the West

has passionately and creatively misunderstood Japan for more than a hundred years”

and he “wanted to know what it was about Japan that produced such intensity and

zeal in artists”.

After an intense acquaintanceship during the last six years of Iggie, when he

died, Edmund inherited the netsukes. He tells:

“After the funeral Jiro [the Iggie’s young Japanese partner] asks me to help sort out Iggie’s clothes. I open the cupboards in his dressing-room and see the shirts ordered by colour. As I pack the ties away, I notice that they map his holidays with Jiro in London and Paris, Honolulu and New York.

When this job is done, over a glass of wine, Jiro takes out his brush and ink and writes a document and seals it. It says, he tells me, the once he has gone I should look after the netsuke”.

He also gives us a wide range of details. There are different types of material

they are made of – wood, elm, ivory, etc – and each one look to have its particularity:

“most of them are signed […]. Some of these netsuke carry no name. Some have bits of

paper glued to them, bearing tiny numbers carefully written in red pen […]. Some of

the netsuke are studies in running movement… Others have small congested

movements that knot your touch: a girl in a wooden bath, a vortex of clam shells […]”.

Edmund seemed to have been very impressed with this inheritance, even by

the fact of its permanence in the family over the years and by the artistic value of the

collection. It’s interesting when he describes each kind of netsuke. “Owning this

netsuke – inheriting all them – means I have been handed a responsibility to them and

to the people who have owned them”. He has a feeling as he has a kind of “divine-

mission” to shelter that collection. Upon this idea of the mini-statues belonging to

different people over more than a century, Edmund takes the inspiration for his

narrative and reveal his purposes with his book: “I want to walk into each room where

this object has lived […] And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they

felt about it and thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed”. Thus, the

author opens his long and real story about the relationship between his family and

these tiny beings full of beauty and mystery.