The best moment in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are comes when the creature Carol introduces the child Max to his clay model of a densely populated island. Shot in slow motion, the model reveals an intricate network of cartoonish faces, not unlike those put before us in this naïvely intelligent exhibition. Netsuke is, practically speaking, a low-budget type of art, deeply attached to its social and material reality. Because traditional Japanese clothing doesn’t include pockets, personal belongings are suspended on string and held in place by a netsuke toggle. For those cultivating the front of an elegant Japanese gentleman, an ornate ensemble of netsuke is apparently a tell-tale sign. Yet seen outside of Japan and recontextualised at an exhibition in Cambridge, these everyday objects are made strange for the viewer: netsuke are to be dressed with, not gazed at and subjected to analysis.

The truth is that some of these pieces are so filled with emotion and so ingenuously sculpted that they do deserve critical attention. As a starting point, one could approach this exhibition as having intensity of emotion as its primary subject. Nearly every netsuke, whether gawky child or gruseome beast, appears caught in the rush of a moodswing. That these feelings, and their visual brilliance, are embedded in essentially lifeless and tacky porcelain demonstrates how amateur technique needn’t be limiting. There is too much of a tendency to value art for its delicacy and detail, a fussy conservatism which a modest show like this one helpfully evades. But our connection with this art can only go so far. On the one hand, we have a sympathetic experience with these netsuke; on the other they remain weirdly remote, the inanimate inhabitants of another culture altogether.