acknowledgments and thanks are due to my two close collaborators. Jean A. Lavaud, photographer of the Musée Guimet in Paris, did all the photography in this book, understanding precisely the spirit in which I desired to have photographic enlargements of netsuke made. Ralph Friedrich, poet and an editor with the Charles E. Tuttle Company in Tokyo, did by far the larger part of the work of translating this book from my French manuscript, at the same time supplying a number of interesting additions and helpful suggestions from his wide knowledge of Japan.
I take advantage of this note also to thank, first of all, the person who originally acquainted me with netsuke, and then, all those who inspired me to love, understand, and acquire them. My acknowledgment goes particularly to Felix Tikotin, of Wassenaar, the Netherlands, who was an excellent teacher. Equal thanks go to all those who generously loaned me netsuke for reproduction here, and especially to Georges Coedès, Curator of the Musée d'Ennery.
ADRIENNE BARBANSON LEFÈVRE-VACQUERIE
Garches, France
NETSUKE AND JAPANESE LEGENDS:
Many of Japan's ancient myths and legends are of foreign inspiration. They stem chiefly from India and China, and occasionally from Tibet, Burma, or Korea. Little by little, they were transformed and finally made Japanese.
As for legends of purely Japanese origin, they are of two kinds: those which go back to the beginnings of the Shinto religion—the most ancient of Japanese religions, which already existed twelve centuries before the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the sixth century a.d.—and those more recent, dating from the Middle Ages of Japan.
The latter were inspired by the epic poems and high exploits of celebrated warriors, or again by the adventures of Buddhist monks or of exalted persons of the imperial court. A considerable number of books, illustrated manuscripts, and commentaries relate their doings down to the last detail.
The oldest collections, the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, were compiled in the eighth century a.d. and describe the creation of the heavens and the earth, the existence of the gods, and events of remotest times in Japan. The Taketori Monogatari, which is the oldest specimen of Japanese romantic literature, describes mainly the customs of the court at Kyoto. Later, in the seventeenth century, there were the ehon, or illustrated books, which became more and more refined. It was in these that the first woodblock prints appeared. At the beginning of the eighteenth century a Japanese painter, Tachibana no Morikuni, illustrated more than one hundred works—inspired as he was by the legends and the history of Japan. Finally, one of the best known of Japanese artists, Hokusai (17601849), created a masterpiece, the Hokusai Manga, a rich collection of miscellaneous sketches which have served as an inspiration to a great number of artists.
The native dances and the drama—both the classical Noh, which appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the popular theater of the Kabuki, when it began to develop in the sixteenth century—drew their inspiration from legends and folk tales and are still performed in Japan as they were at the time of their origin: in the purest of traditions.
First literature and then the dance and the theater have therefore been an inexhaustible source for all Japanese artists: painters, designers, sculptors, engravers, ceramists, and artisans. They have found in this source myriads of subjects to serve as themes for the decoration of innumerable screens, prints, kakemono, lacquer ware, snuffboxes, and charming inro (medicine boxes), as well as fine fabrics and numbers of trinkets. The finely carved sword-guards (tsuba) often portray the crests of noble Japanese families or have been inspired by such insignia. All of these objects, among them many of great artistic worth, are in general decorated with depictions of the most poetic deeds of history and legend.
But there exists still another artistic form for presenting the legends—a form often humorous and at the same time thoroughly and typically Japanese. This is the great family of the netsuke.
What is a netsuke? In Japanese the word is made up of ne, meaning root, and tsuke, meaning attach. It is pronounced "nets'ke" with the "u" suppressed and is often written this way in foreign languages. In the beginning (the first known netsuke date from the fifteenth century) the netsuke was nothing more than a simple piece of root or bone pierced by two holes through which the ancient Japanese passed a cord from which they suspended knives, purses, or other small objects at their waists. On the whole, netsuke began by being purely utilitarian. It is said that the introduction of tobacco into Japan by the Portuguese in 1542 gave considerable impetus to the creation of more and more netsuke, since they came into demand for use with tobacco pouches and pipes.
In effect, the netsuke, fastened by a cord to the snuffbox or tobacco pouch and serving as a counterweight or toggle, prevented it from slipping through the sash of the wearer. It served the same purpose for all sorts of objects suspended from the sash: little boxes containing one's personal seal (ban) and its red ink pad, purses, portable writing sets, perfume flacons, tinder-boxes, and tobacco pipes with their containers. Women attached netsuke to their inro, tiny medicine boxes exquisitely decorated.
In the sixteenth century, as the artistic sense developed, the netsuke, which had been primitively a piece of bone or wood, now became a circle or a disc (manju) and was next decorated with an engraving or a bas-relief sculpture. Finally it came to carry representations of one or more persons, animals, flowers, fruits, or small masks.
Although the size of a netsuke normally varies only between two and six centimeters in height and between two and three centimeters in thickness, it sometimes represents a complete house or a boat filled with innumerable persons, animals, utensils, and so forth. There are some veritable masterpieces of the miniature among these tiny treasures, and one often needs a magnifying glass to distinguish all the details.
The oldest netsuke are frequently quite rudimentary and clumsy in their carving and are never signed. Those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are sometimes signed and are fairly stylized. They have such a grace and such an epitomization of spirit that it is almost impossible to confuse them with the more florid netsuke of the nineteenth century. The latter are characterized by a much more detailed sculpture. Some of them are virtual masterpieces of realism, but they have lost their vigor in becoming trinkets that no longer have any relation to the usefulness of genuine netsuke.
In the seventeenth century, the netsuke carver reproduced a human figure or an animal in which nothing but the essential appeared—hence the extreme stylization. It was a principle of the carver that such figures must spring forth spontaneously from the material employed and in accordance with the form of that material. This period corresponded with that of the total isolation in which Japan lived: the period that resulted in the creation by her artists of works purely Japanese and with scarcely any outside influence.
Plate 2. Inro and Netsuke. Lacquer, with decoration in relief and ivory inlay. Unsigned. Late 18th century. Collection of the author.
The inro, to which the netsuke was attached to form a counterweight or toggle, was an exquisitely fashioned lacquer box for medicine and cosmetics. It was divided into sections which fitted together with such smoothness and precision that only the finest of lines showed where they met. The cord which joined the netsuke to the inro served also as a kind of drawstring to hold the sections of the inro in place. For this purpose it was furnished with an ojime, a pierced bead through which the two halves of the cord passed. The ojime might be of coral, jade, or some other semiprecious material.
The inro pictured here is of gold lacquer handsomely decorated in relief and ivory inlay with a tableau representing a group of Japan's classic poets. The netsuke, also in lacquer, portrays Daruma, the legendary prince of India who reputedly introduced the doctrines of Zen
