The Hare with Amber Eyes Read Free

Iggie’s apartment on his desk there was a photograph of them together in a boat on the Inland Sea, a mountain of pines behind them, dappled sunshine on the water. It is January 1960. Jiro, so good-looking with his hair slicked back, has an arm over Iggie’s shoulder. And another picture, from the 1980s, on a cruise ship somewhere off Hawaii, in evening dress, arm in arm.
    Living the longest is hard, says Iggie, under his breath.
    Growing old in Japan is wonderful, he says more loudly. I have lived here for more than half my life.
    Do you miss anything about Vienna? (Why not come straight out and ask him: So what do you miss, when you are old and not living in the country you were born in?)
    No. I didn’t go back until 1973. It was stifling. Smothering. Everyone knew your name. You’d buy a novel in the Kärntner Strasse and they’d ask you if your mother’s cold was better yet. You couldn’t move. All that gilding and marble in the house. It was so dark. Have you seen our old house on the Ringstrasse?
    Do you know, he says suddenly, that Japanese plum dumplings are better than Viennese plum dumplings?
    Actually, he resumes, after a pause, Papa always said that he’d put me up for his club when I was old enough. It met on Thursdays somewhere near the Opera, with all his friends, his Jewish friends. He came back so cheerful on Thursdays. The Wiener Club. I always wanted to go there with him, but he never took me. I left for Paris and then New York, you see, and then there was the war.
    I miss that. I missed that.
     

    Iggie died in 1994 soon after I returned to England. Jiro rang me: there had been only three days in hospital. It was a relief. I came back to Tokyo for his funeral. There were two dozen of us, their old friends, Jiro’s family, Mrs Nakano and her daughter, clouded in tears.
    There is the cremation, and we gather together and the ashes are brought out, and in turns a pair of us pick up long black chopsticks and put the fragments of unburnt bone into an urn.
    We go to the temple where Iggie and Jiro have their interment plot. They had planned this tomb twenty years before. The cemetery is on a hill behind the temple, each plot marked with small stone walls. There is the grey gravestone with both their names already inscribed on it, and a place for flowers. Buckets of water and brushes and long wooden signs with painted inscriptions on them. You clap three times and greet your family and apologise for the delay since you were last there, and clean up, remove old chrysanthemums and put new ones in water.
    At the temple the urn is placed on a small dais and a photograph of Iggie – the photograph of him on the cruise ship in his dinner jacket – is placed in front of it. The abbot chants a sutra and we offer incense, and Iggie is given his new Buddhist name, his kaimyo , to help him in his next life.
    Then we speak of him. I try to say, in Japanese, how much my great-uncle means to me and cannot because I am in tears and because, despite my expensive two-year scholarship, my Japanese isn’t good enough when I need it. So instead, in this room in this Buddhist temple, in this Tokyo suburb, I say the Kaddish for Ignace von Ephrussi, who is so far from Vienna, for his father and his mother, and for his brother and sisters in their diaspora.
    After the funeral Jiro asks me to help sort out Iggie’s clothes. I open the cupboards in his dressing-room and see the shirts ordered by colour. As I pack the ties away, I notice that they map his holidays with Jiro in London and Paris, Honolulu and New York.
    When this job is done, over a glass of wine, Jiro takes out his brush and ink and writes a document and seals it. It says, he tells me, that once he has gone I should look after the netsuke.
    So I’m next.
     

    There are 264 netsuke in this collection. It is a very big collection of very small objects.
    I pick one up and turn it round in my fingers, weigh it in the palm of my hand. If it is wood, chestnut or