The Master Puppeteer

This is an absolutely fascinating story. It deals with a time in Japanese history when samurai still carried swords, and masterless samurai, called ronin, still roamed the area. It's a story about a boy named Jiro who comes from poor parents.

Like everyone at that time, poverty was a major problem, with the rice merchants and various officials taking much of what the farmers produced, making them very rich, but leaving the farmers with little to eat. Starvation was widespread.

Jiro joins a puppet group, the practice called Bunraku. There is a lot of information worked into the fictional parts about how the puppets were moved, what the plays were like, how they were performed, and what jobs various people had.

The fictional part of the story deals with a Robin Hood-type of person who has a group of men that take from the rich, and give to the poor. This part of the story deals with how the police want to catch him, and how Jiro learns that Saburo, the thief, is someone he actually knows. At the same time, Jiro is trying to deal with her mother joining a roving group of trouble-makers and his father's supposedly being ill.

The story also shows just how violent things could be at the time.

This is an extremely well done, extremely interesting book.


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