“Tanuki Soup”
Ceramic, rope, metal, and wood
5′.5″ x 4′ x 3′
Permanent collection: Crocker Art Museum
2007
Based on the story of the Tanuki

Details

Opening day at the new wing of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Ca

Tony decided to create two individual sculptures from the Tanuki story, each animating the plot in three dimensions: Tanuki Soup and Tanuki Soup II, both made in 2007. What fascinated Tony was the trickster and shape-shifting qualities of the character. As the story goes: the mischievous Tanuki raids a farmer’s crops and is caught during the process by the farmer, who brings the animal into his house and strings it up in the kitchen, upside-down, hanging from the rafters. The farmer’s wife is busy in the kitchen pounding rice with a wooden mallet to make mochi but turns her attention to a large pot, where she intends to boil the Tanuki and make soup for dinner. The farmer returns to his fields to repair the damage done by the Tanuki. Meanwhile, the upside-down Tanuki pleads for his life back in the kitchen, promising not to run away if the wife frees him. His tricks of persuasion succeed, and the wife cuts him down. Without hesitation, Tanuki kills the farmer’s wife with the mallet she had been using to pound the rice and throws her into the big pot intended for him. Being a shapeshifter, the Tanuki becomes the wife and serves the farmer the soup, which the farmer eats heartily. Once the farmer empties his bowl, the shapeshifter sheds the wife’s appearance, turns back into his true self, the Tanuki, jumps out of the window, and yells back at the farmer, “Ha, you just ate your wife!” Upon hearing this, the farmer becomes distraught and cries for three days. A rabbit, a friend to the farmer, observes his condition and inquires, “What’s wrong?” After the farmer tells his rabbit friend the entire story, the rabbit devises a revenge plan. The rabbit seeks out the Tanuki and challenges him to a boat race, knowing that he will provide the Tanuki with a boat made of mud. The Tanuki accepts the challenge. When he launches the boat given to him by the rabbit into the water, the mud-made vessel sinks, and the Tanuki drowns. Tanuki Soup and Tanuki Soup II Tony has rigorously sculpted the objects surrounding the protagonist, the Tanuki/ Farmer’s Wife, that reveal all aspects of the folktale: the frontal view depicts the Tanuki-as-Wife holding a kettle and large pot (with the lifeless hand of the real wife protruding) in preparation for the Tanuki soup; rolling out of stacked bento boxes below her feet are the vegetables she will add to the broth, a pile of wood that is stoking the orange/red fire, and to the left, a cascading wave of water on which sails the rabbit in his sturdy boat. The miniaturized grieving Farmer sits on the platform base, having become the ornamental toggle or fastener (Netsuke) on the cord that holds the Inro, or small box that hangs from the Tanuki’s Kimono sash. On the reverse is the Tanuki dog with a stick that once held a sake bottle and the wooden mallet used as the murder weapon to kill the farmer’s wife. In Tanuki Soup, the dog is in the upright position, the sake bottle is falling, and the mallet lays on the platform. In Tanuki Soup II, the dog/is hanging upside-down from an extended rope, the sake bottle has fallen and lays shattered in pieces on the platform, and the mallet remains in Tanuki’s hand. These large-scale, sculptures with vibrant glazes and multiple characters are now included in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (Tanuki Soup) and the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona (Tanuki Soup II).