"I'd think, as the construction lights on the cranes came on at dusk, stretching deeper and deeper into Tokyo Bay, that I was becoming a sort of amanuensis and that I should probably record what [Iggie] said about Vienna before the First World War, sit at his elbow with a notebook. I never did. It seemed formal and inappropriate. It also seemed greedy: that's a good rich story, I'll have that. Anyway, I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie's stories."
That is Edmund de Waal looking back to time spent in Japan with his great uncle Ignace from whom he was eventually to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke, pieces which had been in his illustrious family for several generations. His memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
"The netsuke have moved from a world of Gustave Moreau ... to the world of a Dulac children's book in Vienna. They build their own echoes, they are part of those Sunday mornings' story-telling, part of The Arabian Nights, the travels of Sinbad the Sailor....They are locked into their vitrine, behind the dressing-room door, which is along the corridor and up the long stairs from the courtyard, which is behind the double oak doors with the porter waiting, which is in the fairytale castle of a Palais on a street that is part of The Thousand and One Nights."
In following the collection, de Waal follows his family's story from its rise as grain merchants in Odessa, to extraordinary wealth as bankers and financiers with reputation and means to rival that of the Rothschilds, and then, as war changes everything, to persecution, relative poverty and death. It is an utterly compelling account, beautifully, sensitively written, moving and amazing. You can see a short video of Edmund de Waal talking about what lay behind the work here, but do read the book - it is marvellous.
