Some years ago, Edmund de Waal inherited a remarkable collection of 264 netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie, whom he had got to know 20 years previously while studying pottery and Japanese in Tokyo. Each week the young de Waal visited his urbane, elderly relative and his friend, Jiro. He heard ancient family stories and was introduced to the hare and all the other miniature carvings in ivory or wood, each one ‘a small, tough explosion of exactitude’. When eventually he inherited the netsuke, he felt he had also been ‘handed a responsibility — to them and to the people who have owned them.’
Although the netsuke originated in 18th- century Japan, they came to Iggie from his childhood home in Vienna and, before that, from belle époque Paris via his father’s cousin, Charles Ephrussi. De Waal, however, is not interested in
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a few stitched-together anecdotes … I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers — hard and tricky and Japanese — and where it has been… I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it — if they thought about it.
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