The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal

    

Random House

   "The children in the dressing-room choose their favourite carving and play with it on the pale-yellow carpet. Gisela loved the Japanese dancer, holding her fan against her brocade gown, caugth in mid-step. Iggie loved the wolf, a tight tangle of limbs, faint markings all along its flanks, gleaming eyes and a snarl. And he loved the bundle of kindling tied up with rope, and the beggar who has fallen asleep over his begging bowl so that all you see is the top of his bald head. Theres is also a dried fish, all scales and shrunken eyes, with a small rat scuttling over it propietorally; its eyes are inlaid jet. And theres is the mad old man with his bony back and bulging eyes, gnawing on a fish with an octopus in his other hand. Elisabeth, contrary, loved the masks with their abstracted memory of faces.

   You could arrange these carvings, ivory and wood, all the fourteen rats in one long row, the three tigers, the beggars over there, the children, the masks, the shells, the fruits.

   You could arrange them by colour, all the way from the dark-brown medlar to the gleaming ivory deer. Or by size. The smallest is the single rat with black inlaid eyes chewing his tail, little bigger than the magenta stamp issued to celebrate the sixtieth year of the Emperor's reign.

   Or you muddle them up, so that your sister can't find the girl in her brocade robes. Or you could stockade the dog and her puppies with all the tigers, and she would have to get out - and she did. Or you could find the one of the woman washing herself in the wooden bathtub, and the even more intringuing one that looked like a mussel shell, until you opened it up and discovered the man and the woman with no clothes on. Or you could scare your brother with the one of the boy trapped in the bell by the witch-snake, with her long black hair trailing round and round.

   And you tell stories about these carvings to your mother, and she chooses one and starts a story about it to you. She picks up the netsuke of the child and the mask. She is good with stories."