THE MASTER PUPPETEER

Here we move forward six hundred years from the 12th century Japan in Of Nightingales That Weep (1974) to a year when the country is ravaged by famine and Jiro, the puppet-maker's son, decides that a theater apprenticeship will be the best way to fill his stomach and ease the burdens of his hard-pressed family. The world of traditional puppet drama—both the glittering artifice onstage and the role-playing that continues behind the scenes—becomes a fantastic backdrop to the mystery that engulfs Jiro when he finds evidence of the Robin Hood style bandit, Saboro, hidden in the theater's storeroom. The deep bond between Jiro and the puppet-master's son Kinshi, both apparently unloved by their demanding fathers, forms this adventure's stable core, but Paterson's ability to exploit the tension between violence in the street and dreamlike confrontations of masked puppet operators is what makes this more lively and immediate then her other, equally exacting, historical fictions.