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He first placed before Frederick a number of Japanese sword-guards, tsubas, as the Japanese call them, small elliptical pieces of metal, about which a man's hand can easily reach. They are decorated with figures in slight relief, partly of the same metal as the ground, partly damascened, or inlaid with copper, gold, or silver.
Frederick and Willy both marvelled at the lapidary style of this metal work, in which the artist with the finest understanding of his art displayed a wealth of composition within the smallest space. One of the tsubas represented a tea pavilion behind a hedge. In the spacious landscape was a waterfall, sky and air, perfectly depicted by holes in the iron, that is, by nothing.
Willy, endlessly resourceful and allowing nothing to daunt him, had ferreted this collection out of a restaurant in the Five Points district, a restaurant of viler repute than even the neighbourhood it was in. A Japanese had left the tsubas with the proprietor of the den as pledge of the payment of his bill, but had disappeared without ever returning to redeem his pledge.
Who can boast a prouder aristocracy than Goto Mitsunori, who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and could trace his descent back through a line of sixteen ancestors, all great masters in the art of sword-decorating, a glorious race of craftsmen, inheriting not only the life, but also the skill of their fore-fathers. And all the things portrayed on those small oval tsubas!
In addition to his tsubas and prints, Willy had a collection of so-called netsuke, some in boxwood, some in ivory, small, dice-like carvings, representing with remarkable animation all sorts of real and fantastic scenes. Among the finest of Willy's possessions was a Japanese figure carved in wood not more than a foot high, a woman selling oysters. Each least detail was most precisely rendered.
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