The Hare With Amber Eyes

Edmund de Waal recounts how his interest in pottery began as a child. At the age of 17, he became an apprentice potter, training in England and under artisans in Japan. In 1991, he spent a year in Tokyo, learning Japanese and making porcelain. Once a week, he visited his 84-year-old great-uncle Iggie, a long-term resident of the city. Iggie had a collection of 264 netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings) displayed in a vitrine (or glass display case). Many of the wood and ivory carvings dated back to pre-modern Japanese dynasties, depicting fruit, people, and animals, including a hare with amber eyes. Taking them out of the cabinet so de Waal could handle them, Iggie would recall how a Parisian cousin gave the netsuke to his parents. He would also describe how he and his sisters, Elisabeth and Gisela, loved playing with them as children. These reminiscences turned to stories about the summers they spent at Kövesces, their country house in Czechoslovakia. When Iggie died in 1994, de Waal inherited the collection.

De Waal wants to unearth the whole story of the netsuke. As a starting point, he knows that his great-grandfather’s cousin, Charles Ephrussi, bought the collection in the 1870s.