Edmund de Waal

The Hare With the Amber Eyes

 

This family memoir begins with a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese sculptures) that the author, Edmund de Waal, inherits from an expat uncle living in Japan. But his uncle hadn’t acquired them in Japan; rather, they’d been passed down through his European Jewish family over generations. Captivated by the netsuke, de Waal begins a journey to trace their origins, from the Paris salons of the impressionists, to the grand homes of the early twentieth-century Viennese Ringstrasse, to an escape from the Nazi threat. The story circles back to contemporary Tokyo and culminates in the tree-lined avenues of Odessa.  Throughout, de Waal’s prose is meditative and lucid—its contemplative attention to detail evokes the experience of observing the fine details of the miniature Japanese sculptures even as this intergenerational and transcontinental story is epic in scope.