All Tomorrow's Parties and The Hare With Amber Eyes

The Hare With Amber Eyes chronicles Edmund de Waal’s family history through a collection of Japanese netsuke, intricately-carved miniature sculptures, passed down from one generation to the another. I’d read the reviews and learnt the author had studied pottery in Japan. I picked it up last week and found myself engrossed within a few pages.

I couldn’t help but see parallels between the presentation of William Gibson’s sci-fi work, All Tomorrow’s Parties and de Waal’s historical take on Japonisme. Vastly different in subject-matter the authors present their work in a minimal but evocative style; Sharp, sparkling sentences where every word is placed with careful, offhand precision.

In doing so both authors attempt, with mixed results, to capture the zen-inspired spirt of traditional Japanese art, whether that of the potter in the The Hare or of the martial artist in All Tomorrow’s Parties.

I’ve always felt business and technology solutions should share the same balance. Or to put it another way, and to borrow from Louis Gonse description of the netsuke in The Hare, they should be; very rich, very simple, very tactile.