The Hare With Amber Eyes

“I pick one up and turn it round in my fingers, weigh it in the palm of my hand. If it is wood, chestnut or elm, it is even lighter than the ivory. You see the patina more easily on these wooden ones: there is a faint shine on the spine of the brindled wolf and on the tumbling acrobats locked in their embrace. The ivory ones come in shades of cream, every colour, in fact, but white. A few have inlaid eyes of amber or horn. Some of the older ones are slightly worn away: the haunch of the faun resting on leaves has lost its markings. There is a slight split, an almost imperceptible fault line on the cicada. Who dropped it? Where and when?”

De Waal’s attention to the quality of the materials from which the netsuke are carved reveals his artistic sensibility. His focus on their patina (the “faint shine” and “small cracks”) emphasizes these signs of age and wear as records of the touch of those who held the Japanese carvings in past generations. This passage thematically exemplifies Objects as Vessels of Memory and Continuity.

“I realise how much I care about how this hard-and-soft, losable object has survived. I need to find a way of unravelling its story. Owning this netsuke—inheriting them all—means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie.”

De Waal confronts the emotional and ethical weight of inheritance, presenting the netsuke as symbols of his family’s history and survival. His impulse to piece together a fragmented family past suggests that ownership entails an obligation to memory and truth. The author’s admission of feeling “unclear and discomfited” conveys the magnitude of his task.

“All this matters because my job is to make things. How objects get handled, used, and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question. I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots. I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth.”

By declaring that “how objects get handled, used and handed on” is his central concern, de Waal links his identity as a potter to his role as his family’s storyteller and historian. His skill for recalling the physical qualities of objects and their tactility (weight, balance, surface, and warmth) illustrates a perspective that intertwines materiality and memory.