The Master Puppeteer: Chapters 1–3

Jiro went through the half curtain that separated the shop from the back of the house. The back door was slid open, and he could see Isako on all fours, blowing at the charcoal in the brazier.

The poor were too hungry to waste their energy strolling about, and the merchants and those who had a little something feared to go out lest they be robbed by the renegade samurai, the ronin, who had forgotten the code of honor but not how to wield their long curved swords.

The poor were too hungry to waste their energy strolling about, and the merchants and those who had a little something feared to go out lest they be robbed by the renegade samurai, the ronin, who had forgotten the code of honor but not how to wield their long curved swords.

His mother would often lament the state of affairs. "Look what we’ve come to. Where will it all end?”

The two men fell into the kind of gossip one engages in in a public bathhouse—the foibles of friends or neighbors, current events as long as no criticism of the government is implied.

He sidled over to the puppet maker and his son.

Sano looked about again before continuing. “It seems that early today a funeral procession was going by the door of Furukawa, the rice merchant."

He wanted to press Sano for more details, or even to hear again some of the earlier exploits of the legendary Saburo, but he bowed his good-bye and followed his father to the dressing room.

Jiro felt warm and sleepy from the bath and dreamed, as he walked, about the marvelous brigand. “I wonder what he really looks like?”

“It is always bad to be a thief, whether your name is Furukawa the rice merchant or Saburo the rogue. But as long as the government does not see fit to punish the one, we must hope that it fails to catch the other.”

The tiny head was covered with running sores, and though the baby cried piteously and the old hag grabbed the garments of those who passed nearby, no one paid any heed.

“Yoshida,” Mochida ventured. “Hanji has come with a puppet for you.”

It was the smell of supper that lent the place an air of opulence.

“I know it is trash.” The puppeteer used polite language, but it came out too gruffly to sound polite. “But if you would do me the honor....”

“I insist.” Yoshida’s voice was deep and commanding. “I will take it as a personal affront if you refuse to eat my food.”

“Then pardon our rudeness.” Jiro scrambled over the cushion at the table and plopped himself down on it. He bowed his head toward the puppeteer. “We humbly receive your gracious hospitality.”

He must be crazy from hunger—that was it—in his right mind he never, never, would have committed such an unpardonable breach of manners.

At any rate, he laughed. “Good, good,” he said. “Let’s dispense with the amenities. I’m hungry myself.”

He turned to Hanji, who sat where he had before still stunned by his son’s unbelievable boorishness. “Come on, Hanji. Try to force yourself to eat a little of this poor food.”

He had completely humiliated his kind father in front of Yoshida—the man upon whom all their livelihood depended.

He kept trying to think of words that would convey an apology to his father for his terrible manners, but since Yoshida had called him “spirited,” he found that all the apologies he framed in his head lacked sincerity.

He thought of the admonition of the samurai code. “When you are hungry, pick your teeth.”

If only he could be like one of them, starving on a tiny rice stipend from the government, but too full of pride to complain.

One September evening, soon after dusk, a small group of Komuso monks approached the entrance of the rice brokerage of Yamamoto and begged for alms.

They wore the traditional basketlike hats from under which they played their flutes so plaintively that the gatekeeper, an emotional man, it was said later, could hardly keep from weeping.

When the clerks found the gatekeeper the next day trussed up like a chicken on a spit, he told how the basket priests, who had seemed so gentle outside his door, had roughly overpowered him once they were within.

In cooperation with the merchants’ guild of Osaka, the daimyo offered a reward of five hundred ryo for information leading to the bandit's capture.

Yoshida had ordered a beautiful young princess, but when Hanji went to deliver it, Yoshida sent it back. “He said there was something cynical about her expression," Hanji explained.

Even seventy years ago when Chikamatsu was alive, the rich merchants must have hounded the poor, goading them to thievery and death.

“Oh, yes. Last summer. After four years of curtain pulling and money taking, Yoshida let me handle feet onstage. But one day it was dusty, and I sneezed. Now I'm back taking money and pulling curtains again. When I die, I will probably be immortalized—Yoshida Kinshi—the world's oldest and most experienced puller of curtains."

“I'm sorry,” Jiro said contritely, “but I have urgent business with Okada the chanter. I was told I could see him at his next rest period.”

The script rested on a low lacquered stand, and Okada would reach over from time to time and turn the pages—a gesture all the more poignant when one looked at his obviously sightless eyes.

Beside him the samisen player strummed the ominous chords that hinted to the audience the doom toward which the hero was inexorably moving.

Beside him the samisen player strummed the ominous chords that hinted to the audience the doom toward which the hero was inexorably moving.

But the musician's face remained as impassive as a still pond—his emotions were all drawn from the three strings of the instrument by the large plectrum that he held in his right hand.

The audience was applauding boisterously.

Okada raised the script and bowed in a gesture of reverence.

Here were the dressing rooms of the reciters and musicians. Hanji had once explained to him that they preferred to remain a bit aloof from the puppeteers—a noisy and emotional bunch of workmen, as these artists were said to regard them.

Kinshi persuaded his mother to give Jiro a second helping of bean soup and shared his quilts with him when the married members of the troupe had gone home and the rest could finally go to bed in their dressing rooms, which also served as living quarters.

If he had no talent for reciting or music or puppet making, what would happen when he tried to move in that perfect rhythm of the puppeteer which imbued their dolls with life?