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 Buddhism into Japan (see Plate 48).
Later, chiefly in the nineteenth century, the netsuke artist sculptured, often by a customer's direction, a person or an animal in the most beautiful material possible—the heart of ivory, for example—without taking inspiration from the original form of the material. And it is thus that one finds among the works of that period an influence less typically Japanese and sometimes Occidental.
The oldest known sculptor of netsuke appears to have been Honami Koetsu (1556—1637), an artist who lived in Kyoto. Subsequently, there were numbers of netsuke carvers, and some of them created actual schools, where both masters and pupils often indiscriminately signed their works without indicating which was which. Up to the present, some 2,700 different signatures have been enumerated. The best known of netsuke sculptors, none of whose works was ever signed, is Yoshimura Shuzan, who lived in the seventeenth century. His sculptures, which are almost always in colored wood and very light, have been sold in Japan for as much as five to six hundred pounds sterling. He had numerous successors who in their turn had pupils, and these signed almost all of their works.
The basic materials used for the creation of netsuke were of the most various kinds: wood (some six hundred varieties, it appears), ivory (elephant or walrus), teeth or horns of animals (deer, antelope, cattle), bone (fish, mammals, birds), nutshells, mother-of-pearl, tortoise shell, coral, amber, jade, onyx, rock crystal, porcelain, sandstone, metals, ceramics, lacquer, beaks of birds, pressed and lacquered sawdust, papier mâché. Some netsuke have even been carved from cherry stones. Of all these various materials it is wood that most collectors consider the netsuke medium, both because it is native to Japan and because the Japanese carvers knew so well how to reveal the inherent beauty of its many different varieties. Ivory, with its beautiful color and texture, was perhaps more highly prized in Japan because it was a rare, imported stuff on which the carvers took special pains, and it still runs wood a close second as the collector's favorite; this, plus the fact that ivory is much more "photogenic" than wood, accounts for the preponderance of ivory netsuke chosen for reproduction here.
There are netsuke of every possible shape. The older ones are often in the form of gourds, while later ones appear in triangular or round-button shapes called manju. Some are discs circled with metal or ivory and encrusted with gold (kagami-buta). Others are of colored wood, and still others, called obi-hasami, are in the shape of a C, so that they hook over the top of the sash. In this book, I illustrate only the more usual forms, but there are many others.
It is important to understand that it sometimes takes many months of work to perfect a netsuke. It is necessary first to choose the subject and the material, then to carve it, or sometimes to engrave it through several processes of which the results are often unbelievably delicate. Certain parts of a human figure or an animal—the eyes, for example—may be inlaid with precious metals, gems, coral, or mother-of-pearl. Some netsuke, once carved, were colored or painted by one or more of numerous processes. Finally, one finds large numbers of netsuke that have been covered with almost innumerable coats of lacquer—sometimes as many as eighty—and then once again deeply carved