Free The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

it…when it was completed. The Japanese man started laughing, and ended up telling him that that would take approximately a further eighteen months; then he showed him another netsuke that was attached to his belt, and informed him that it had taken him several years of work to make it. And as the conversation progressed between the two men, the amateur artist confessed to Mr Sichel that he did ‘not work like that in such a long-drawn out manner…that he needed to be in the process…that it was only on certain days…on days when he had smoked a pipe or two, after he felt gay and refreshed’, essentially letting him know that for this work, he needed hours of inspiration.
     

    These bibelots of ivory or lacquer or mother-of-pearl all seemed to express the fact that Japanese workers had the imagination of makers of ‘ bijoux-joujoux lilliputiens ’, charming Lilliputian trinkets. That the Japanese are small, and make small things, was a commonplace in Paris. This idea of the miniature was often held as the reason that Japanese art seemed to lack ambition. They were brilliant at the laborious fashioning of rapid feeling, but fell down when it came to the grander feelings of tragedy or awe. That is why they lacked a Parthenon, a Rembrandt.
    What they could do was everyday life. And emotion. It was these emotions that entranced Kipling when he first saw netsuke in Japan on his travels in 1889. He writes in one of his letters from Japan of:
     

    a shop full of the wrecks of old Japan…The Professor raves about the cabinets in old gold and ivory studded with jade, lazuli, agate, mother-o’-pearl and cornelian, but to me more desirable than any wonder of five-stoned design are the buttons and netsuke that lie on cotton wool, and can be taken out and played with. Unfortunately the merest scratch of Japanese character is the only clue to the artist’s name, so I am unable to say who conceived, and in creamy ivory executed, the old man horribly embarrassed by a cuttle-fish; the priest who made the soldier pick up a deer for him and laughed to think that the brisket would be his and the burden his companion’s; or the dry, lean snake coiled in derision on a jawless skull mottled with the memories of corruption; or the Rabelaisian badger who stood on his head and made you blush though he was not half an inch long; or the little fat boy pounding his smaller brother; or the rabbit that had just made a joke; or – but there were scores of these notes, born of every mood of mirth, scorn and experience that sways the heart of man; and by this hand that has held half a dozen of them in its palm I winked at the shade of the dead carver! He had gone to his rest, but he had worked out in ivory three or four impressions that I had been hunting after in cold print.
     

    And the Japanese could do erotica. This was hunted with a particular passion: Goncourt talked of his ‘debauches’ buying it at Sichel’s. Shunga – prints of acrobatic sexual positions or bizarre encounters between courtesans and fantastical creatures – were hunted out by Degas and Manet. Octopuses were especially favoured as their sinuosity offered great inventive possibilities. Goncourt records that he has just bought ‘an album of Japanese obscenities…They amuse me, enchant my eyes…The violence of the lines, unexpected conjunctions, the arrangement of the accessories, the caprice in their positioning and the clothes, the…picturesque quality of the genitals.’ Erotic netsuke were also highly popular with Parisian collectors. Stock themes included countless octopuses embracing naked girls, monkeys carrying very large and phallic mushrooms, and burst persimmons.
    These erotic objets complemented other Western objects for male pleasure: the bronzes, small classical nudes perfect for the hand, that connoisseurs would keep in the study for learned discussion of the quality of the modelling, or of patination. Or the collections of small enamelled