The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal’s justly celebrated book, traces the history of a collection of 264 netsuke. Popular in Japan’s Edo period, netsuke are small carvings, typically of animal or human subjects. They functioned as a kind of toggle that served to attach a purse string to a kimono belt.

Writing about these objects, de Waal became a scholar of his family’s history. In the 1870s, some fifteen years after the “opening” of Japan to the west, the netsuke were bought in Paris. The purchaser was Charles Ephrussi, a wealthy patron of the Impressionists, editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and de Waal’s great, great uncle. The book deals with the potentially fraught issue of how the works were passed from one member of the family to the next, and how they came to mean something different to each successive owner. After Paris, the collection spent time in Vienna and Tokyo before falling into the hands of de Waal. The fact that the 264 figurines remain in the family—and weren’t seized by the Nazis—turns out to be a minor miracle.

While reading the book, I found myself thinking of Walter Benjamin’s beautiful essay “Unpacking my Library.” “Inheritance”, Benjamin writes:

is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility[…]. The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.

De Waal certainly has the attitude of an heir towards the objects, and I can’t think of a more vivid account of this process of “transmission.” In the book, transmission usually involves inheritance, or else a gift within the family, but its most remarkable example depends on a member of the broader household, someone who is not a Ephrussi by birth or marriage. An object’s custodian is, of course, not always its legal owner.

Still, I’m not entirely sure the book proves all of Benjamin’s points. If anything, de Waal makes you want to amend his last proposition: the phenomenon of collecting changes meaning as it loses its personal owner. It’s commendable that de Waal doesn’t unduly focus on Charles, but rather on how each inheritor reinvented the collection to suit his or her own interests and needs. (Sustaining a collection can sometimes be as interesting as founding it, and take as much effort, while inheriting a collection presents its own peculiar challenges.) When, finally, the netsuke are placed in de Waal’s London home, the objects are arranged in a new display cabinet and left for the writer’s own children to discover.

The netsuke remain in the same family, but now feel as though they are also my objects. De Waal is conscious of how he, too, is reinventing the collection. The act of writing gives them to the world, or at least makes a private collection a matter of public interest. And this, in turn, provides another good reason–perhaps the most compelling yet–to keep them together as a collection.

In Japanese, the word “netsuke” relates to the objects’ function and means “to root” and “to attach.” De Waal’s netsuke are now attached in a new way: his words have bound them together.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Art History, Literature, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.