NATIVES of Awaji say that the puppet theater originated there. In the center of the island there is a village called Ichimura that even now has seven puppet companies. Once there were thirty-six. Ichimura is known as "puppet-town," and its theater goes back, one hardly knows how many centuries, to a certain court nobleman who was banished from Kyoto and came to live in Ichimura, and who in his boredom with country life took to making puppets and to manipulating them for his own amusement. The famous Awaji Gennojo family descends from him, it is said. The family still has an impressive estate in the village, and its puppet company goes on tour from Awaji to Shikoku on the south and to western Honshu on the north. But the Gennojo family has no monopoly on the Ichimura puppets. One might say, in fact, with perhaps a little exaggeration, that the whole village is in some way occupied with the puppet theater, as singers and accompanists, puppeteers and stage managers. In busy seasons the people of Ichimura move out to work in the fields, and in slack seasons they fall into puppet companies to tour the island. The Awaji theater is in the truest sense a folk art, an art born long ago of rural tradition.

January and May are the theater months. If one crosses over to Awaji then, one finds plays in the towns and in the fields, all over the island. In the larger towns a building is sometimes borrowed, but for the most part the plays are given half out of doors under makeshift shelters of logs and rush mats, and when it rains, that is the end of a day's performance. A real puppet madness occasionally seizes the Awaji farmer. He wanders from house to house with little one-hand marionettes, going through a favorite passage, himself both singer and puppeteer, when someone asks him in; he may even bring his house to ruin with his puppets, and he has been known in an extreme case to go quite insane.

But with the new age and its pressures, even this proud art is dying. The old dolls deteriorate until they can no longer be used, and there is almost no one who can replace them. Only three men still call themselves puppet-makers, Tengu-Hisa and his student Tengu-Ben across the straits in Tokushima, and Yura-Game of Yura on Awaji. Tengu-Hisa, the only real master of the three, is an old man of sixty or seventy. When he dies, the old art will probably die with him. Tengu-Ben is in Osaka with the Bunraku puppet theater, but his work is actually limited to repairing old dolls and to retouching their faces; and while in his day old Yura-Game made some fine puppets, the younger Yura-Game is a barber or some such fellow who repairs puppets in his spare time. Since the old puppets are thus as good as irreplaceable, great pains are taken to preserve them. In the summer or just before the New Year broken puppets from all over the island are collected at the puppet-maker's for repairs, and a broken head or two can be had cheaply if one goes to Awaji at the right time, it is said.

The old man had explored the possibility in great detail. "This time I am definitely going to get myself a puppet," he announced.

He had been trying without much success to get an old puppet from the Bunraku theater in Osaka. The Awaji pilgrimage was planned at least partly to let him look for the puppet he had been assured could be found there. He would see a puppet play, he said he would visit the Gennojo family and Yura-Game, and on the way back to Osaka he would cross the straits and visit Tengu-Hisa in Tokushima.

"Unhurried, isn't it? Did you ever see anything quite like it?"

"Unhurried it is, all right," Kaname agreed. He and the old man exchanged glances as they entered the shelter with its rush-matted pit. Relaxed, unhurried—the words quite took in the mood of the place. Once, one day toward the end of an April, he did not remember how long ago, Kaname had gone to the pantomimes at the Mibu Temple in Kyoto. The lazy warmth of spring bathed the temple precincts, and in the stands he felt a pleasant drowsiness come over him. The voices of the children playing outside, the awnings of the little festival shops, the candy shops and the comic-mask shops, shining like stained glass in the sun—all the sounds and impressions from the street and the temple yard melted into the slow, genial sounds of the recitation and the twanging accompaniment on the stage with one quiet, liquid movement. Kaname would find himself drifting off to sleep and pull himself awake; twice, three times, the drowsing off and the quick awakening... and again and then again. And each time he opened his eyes the same farce still held the stage, the same slow recital still pushed its way along, the children still played outside, and the lazy sun still reflected from the awnings. A spring day that would never end, he almost felt.... It was as if a hundred formless and uncollected dreams were passing through his mind, the dreaming and the waking fused one into the other.... Call it a taste of the joys of great peace, call it a transport to some fairyland, it was a feeling of serene removal from the world such as Kaname had not felt since the day he had been taken, still a child, to see the Kagura dancing at the Shrine of the Sea God in the old downtown section of Tokyo.

Here in the puppet theater he felt the mood come over him again. Although the roof and sides were covered with straw mats, irregular chinks where they met admitted rays of sunlight to the pit and the seats around it. Here and there a patch of blue sky showed, or a stretch of waving, rustling grass down toward the river. Where another theater would have been dark with tobacco smoke, this one was fresh as the out-of-doors, and a spring breeze came in over meadows bright with dandelions and the mauve of clover.

In the pit, where rush mats and rows of cushions were laid out on the bare ground, the children of the village had taken over. Noisy games, oranges, candy—it was lively as the playground of a kindergarten, untroubled as a country shrine festival. No (me seemed to notice that a play was going on.

"A bit different from what we find in Osaka."

The three of them, boxes in hand, stood for a time looking down at the confusion of the small juvenile kingdom, not trying to move on inside.

"The play must have started. The puppets seem to be moving."

Across the kindergarten in the pit there flickered suggestions of something different in kind from the puppet theater Kaname had seen in Osaka. A world of fantasy, it seemed, childlike in its simplicity and its radiance. The silk backdrop was splashed with morning-glories, and the scene must be the firefly hunt on the River Uji at the beginning of Morning-Glory Diary, he decided. A young warrior puppet, Komazawa no doubt, and a beautiful young girl one would take for Miyuki knelt side by side on the deck of a boat, bent one toward the other, fans in hand, whispering of love. Kaname would have expected the scene to be sensuous, erotic; but he could hear neither the singing nor the samisen accompaniment, and the engaging little movements of the puppets suggested an art far removed from the realism of Bungoro and the Osaka theater. It was almost as if the puppets here were playing with the children in the pit, innocently, unaffectedly.

O-hisa started for the stands. The old man, however, was of the opinion that the puppet stage should be seen from below. "This is what we want," he said, deliberately choosing a place in the open pit.

The spring grass was pleasant enough, but the chill of the raw ground soon crept through the thin mats and cushions.

"I shan't be able to stand up afterwards," said O-hisa, piling up three cushions for herself. "And it's hardly what you would call healthy, either."

"You can't expect comfort at a place like this, and you don't get the feel of the play from up there. And think of the fun you'll have talking about the cold afterwards."

It was evident, though, for all his determination to ignore it, that the old man felt the cold himself. Presently he had sake warming over an alcohol burner.

"We seem to be quite in style. Everyone has boxes."

"Some of them are elaborate enough, too—look at the lacquer-work," said Kaname. "I suppose when everyone automatically goes to the play, everyone automatically takes along the same lunch."

"It used to be that way everywhere. It was in Osaka until not too long ago. In Kyoto you still see old families going out to look at the cherry blossoms, and the houseboy walking on ahead with the lunch and the saké. When they arrive at wherever they're going, they hire a kettle to heat the sake, and when they finish, they put what's left back in the bottle and take it home for cooking. A Tokyo man will tell you that shows how tightfisted they are in Kyoto, but when you think about it, it's not a bad idea to carry along your own lunch and not have to take your chances with a restaurant. At least you know what you're eating."

The audience was mostly in the pit, gathered here and there in little knots, each knot beginning its own celebration. There were few men, perhaps because it was still early in the day. The village wives and daughters, usually with a few children, some with babes in arms, formed their ranks around the lunch boxes quite as though they had taken up housekeeping, quite untroubled by what was happening on the stage. The bustle and the clutter were immense.

Stew and saké were on sale at the refreshment stand, which was patronized by a few of the parties. Most of the spectators, however, had their own lunches in the impressive boxes that had caught the old man's eye. It must have been rather like this at Asuka-yama and the other popular cherry resorts in Tokyo, Kaname thought, before the old system, the system of the centuries of isolation, began to break down. The elaborate lacquerware had always seemed to him a luxury whose day was past, but here for the first time he saw it as useful and unaffected. Indeed, now that he thought of it, the lacquer did go well with the theater lunch, with the pale tones of its omelets and rice balls. There were lively reds and whites throughout the theater, and somehow the food was more appetizing by virtue of the color effect. Japanese food is meant to be looked at and not eaten, people sometimes say. Perhaps they are right if they are making fun of the formal banquet carefully laid out on its trays. But here the colors were more than only pleasant to look at; they worked on the appetite, made even the unremarkable rice and pickles seem a little more exciting.

"It's the saké and the cold that do it," the old man said, getting up and excusing himself. He had already been outside two or three times.

But the most in distress was O-hisa. Knowing what sort of place it would be, she had made what preparations she could to get through the day without incident. Her attempts to forestall a crisis only acted as a stimulant, however, and too, with die cold creeping up her spine, she had made the mistake of joining the old man in a cup or two. Presently the crisis was immediate.

She got up. "Excuse me, but where..."

Kaname went out to explore and came back frowning. "It will never do for you." The facilities were in fact limited to two or three buckets, quite out in the open and used without inhibition by men and women alike.

"What should I do?"

"What are you worried about?" the old man broke in. "If they stare at you, stare right back at them."

"But I don't think I could manage—standing."

"Don't women stand in Kyoto?"

"I know at least one who never has."

O-hisa went out to look for a restaurant in the neighborhood. It was nearly an hour before she came back. She had walked past the restaurants and found them all a little hard to go into, not the sort of restaurants she liked, and she had found herself at the inn and had hired a rickshaw to bring her back. She wondered what the other young women did (the old women, of course, were up to anything), whether they really managed with those open buckets. As she was turning the problem over in her mind, a disturbance broke out behind them.

A housewife, posting herself squarely in the aisle, had helped her small boy undo his buttons so that he could relieve himself. It was as though the plumbing had burst, and even the old man was a little upset.

"Things are getting primitive. Practically in our lunch, too."

Meanwhile, unaffected by the confusion, the play took its course and singers came and went. Perhaps a little heady from sake taken so early in the day and from the conversation buzzing so violently around him, Kaname saw it only as a succession of flickering images quite detached from any narrative. Not that he was bored or annoyed. The sensation was rather the pleasant one of pickling in a warm bath, or perhaps of sleeping fitfully on a warm morning, a sweet, unhurried, languorous sensation. While he watched the play in this absent mood, Miyuki and Komazawa apparently parted at Akashi, and several more scenes passed, and the action reached the shelter at Hamamatsu; but the sunlight showed no sign of fading, and through the chinks in the mats the blue sky still shone as happily as in the morning. It hardly seemed necessary to worry about the plot. Just to lose oneself in the movements of the puppets was enough, and the disorderliness of the audience was no hindrance. Rather the myriad noises and myriad colors combined into a brightness, a liveliness, like a kaleidoscope pointed into the sun, and the eye took from them an overall harmony.

"Unhurried." Kaname tried the word again.

"But the puppets are remarkable. And the man handling Miyuki is not bad at all."

"It might be better if it were even a little more primitive."

"This sort of thing is fairly standard wherever you see it. The lines are the same and the action follows along."

"And the Awaji singing?"

"Some people say there's a difference, but I've never been able to see it myself. Osaka and Awaji sound pretty much alike to me."

To conform to a type, to be the captive of a form, means the decadence of an art, it is sometimes said. But what of folk arts like this puppet theater-have they not become what they are with the help of hard, fixed standards? The heavy-toned old country plays, in a sense, have in them the work of the race. Generation after generation of gifted performers has built each item in the repertoire to a standardization of property and action, handed on so carefully that by following its prescriptions the amateur can mount the singer's platform and bring forth a fair copy of the play, and the spectators as they watch can make the association in their minds with the great names whose work is there. Sometimes at a country inn one sees a sort of amateur theatrical put on by children. The instruction has been good, and the performers have learned well—one wonders how they can have learned so well. Perhaps it is that the old theater, unlike the modern theater with all its erratic individual flights, provides a guide and a reference to which women and children can turn, and makes the teaching and the learning easy. In the days before motion pictures, there was thus a happy substitute for them: a few hands and a little equipment, and a puppet theater could be put together to wander lightly over the country. It must have been a deep comfort to the farmers, this theater—one cannot know what a comfort and a diversion. How thoroughly the old theater must have penetrated into the corners of the country, one thinks, how deeply its roots must have sunk themselves into the life of the farms!

Kaname had seen the parts of Morning-Glory Diary that everyone sees, the last encounter at the inn and the separation at the river crossing. He was therefore familiar with lines like "One year, firefly-hunting on the River Uji," and "Weeping, we await a sailing wind at Akashi," but he had never before actually seen the firefly hunt on the Uji, or the farewell at Akashi, or the present scene in the shelter at Hamamatsu. While it resembled a historical play in many ways, it fortunately lacked the contorted plot and the warrior's cruelty that so characterize the historical drama. Rather it moved forward with the simple brightness that one associates with the genre theater, with even a touch of light humor. Kaname did not know what period was supposed to be represented, or whether the love story was based on historical fact. He had heard somewhere that the hero, Komazawa, was modeled on the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan. Somehow, though, the play seemed to take one back to an earlier time, to the civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or to the Muromachi Shogunate before them. Indeed, there were touches that seemed to suggest Heian, the great period of the court nobility—the warrior sending an old folksong to the maiden, and the maiden singing it to the accompaniment of the koto, the old Heian zither; or the maiden followed about by a faithful and diligent nurse named Asaka, "Faint Perfume." But while one was thus taken back to the far past, one had at the same time a feeling that the action was extremely near at hand, popular, plebeian. Asaka dressed as a pilgrim, singing her song, seemed to be close to these people, a close acquaintance. One would not be surprised to encounter now and then a woman dressed in the same clothes and singing the same song in the streets hereabouts. The puppet theater must seem as near and familiar to the native of this western part of the country as it seemed foreign to the easterner from Tokyo.

"But we could have had a better play," the old man remarked suddenly, as though he had remembered something. "The Lady Tamamo or Song of Ise, for instance. You see things in them you never see in Osaka, they say."

Passages that have been cut from the Osaka plays as gruesome or immodest are still shown at Awaji in their pure, untrimmed form, and it was to those eccentricities that the old man referred. The Lady Tamamo, for instance, is usually shown at Osaka in three acts only, but at Awaji it is played straight through from the prologue, and the nine-tailed fox, having killed the Lady Tamamo, is shown eating her entrails—wads of red cotton apparently. In Song of Ise the slaughter of the ten is shown most graphically, with arms and legs strewn about the stage. Or, in a somewhat more playful vein, a devil with a most monstrously large head arrives to be exorcised at the climax of Mount De.

"That's what we need. None of this tameness. Tomorrow they do Mount lmose—something like that would be worth seeing."

"But I like this one well enough. Possibly because this is the first time I've seen it through from the beginning."

Kaname knew little about the finer points of handling puppets. He did feel, though, the roughness of this performance in comparison with the Osaka puppet theater; it could only be called countrified, he had to conclude. Part of this effect was no doubt due to the puppets themselves, to their features and their clothes. The faces were stiff, hard, at a distance from humanity. In Osaka the heroine would have had a round, gentle face; here she had a long, cold face, a high nose like a proud Kyoto carving or one of the dolls brought out in the spring for the Doll Festival. The face of the villain was violently red and evil, the face of a devil or an apparition rather than that of a man. Then too the puppets (this was particularly true of the heads) were a good deal larger than those in Osaka, the principal ones, indeed, as large as a child of seven or eight. The native of Awaji says that the Osaka puppets are too small, that it is not possible to catch the finer expressions from the Osaka stage. He objects also to the powdered faces of the Osaka puppets. The Osaka craftsmen, in their efforts to produce the effect of the human skin, leave a coating of powder over the paint, while at Awaji the sheen is purposely brought out by careful polishing, and the Osaka style is scorned as gauche and crude. Indeed, one has to admit that the Awaji puppets are expressive, their eyes in particular being active and versatile. The principal puppets can move their eyes up and down and to the right and left, can express red-eyed anger and pale-eyed astonishment. The Osaka puppet has no such skill. The lady puppet in fact is unable to use her eyes at all, while at Awaji, one is proudly told, even she can open and close them at will.

In its general dramatic effect the Osaka performance seemed to Kaname superior; but here at Awaji the audience apparently paid less attention to the play itself than to the puppets. The puppets they watched as a parent would watch a performing child, dwelling carefully and fondly on each gesture. While the Osaka theater, subsidized by the great Shōchiku theater company, could afford certain fineries, however, the Awaji theater, the hobby of farmers, had to get by as best it could. The ornaments and the clothes were shabby, and both Miyuki and Komazawa looked more than a little threadbare.

But the old man, with his fondness for old clothes, liked them. "Much better than in Osaka," he said. He had for some time been turning an envious eye on the puppets' clothing, calling attention to the choicer articles, here a stiff mohair sash, there a yellow Hachijō kimono. "It used to be this way in Osaka, but lately they've gone gaudy. It's all right, I suppose, for them to get new costumes every season, but it's a sign of decay when they start using muslin prints and gold dust. Puppets are like Noh actors. The older their clothes are, the better."

Miyuki and her companion started off down the Tōkaidō Highway, and the long day came toward a close. It was quite dark when the curtain fell on the final roadside scene of Morning-Glory Diary. The stands began to fill, the clutter and disorder of the day gave way to the air of an evening at the theater, and small dinner parties took shape all through the building. Bare hundred-watt bulbs hung here and there, lighting up the place well enough, but giving off fearsome glare. The stage too was lighted with bare bulbs hung from above-no such theatrical frills here as footlights and flood-lights. As the next play began, the dolls' faces grew still shinier, and Jūjirō and Hatsugiku gave off such a radiance that it was quite impossible to see what they really looked like.

The changes of singers began to bring on near-professionals. From one side of the hall someone shouted: "Be quiet, everybody. He's from my village. Good, isn't he?" And from somewhere else: "Let's have no more of that. Ours is a whole lot better." A good half of the audience, evidently aroused by the sake, took the part of one side or the other, and the competition between village and village grew intense as the evening progressed. At the poetic climax the loudest of the appreciators became quite intoxicated with emotion. "It's too much," they cried in tear-laden voices. The puppeteers, too, seemed to have had a cup or two. Their bloodshot eyes could have been overlooked had it not been for the remarkable way they had of hanging over the dolls—particularly the lady dolls—at crucial junctures. The same mannerisms are seen in Osaka, of course, but these men would have been striking enough anyway in their formal stage dress, their faces burned black from the days in the fields and flushed from liquor. The cries from the audience ("It is too much!") urged them on until, drunk with their art, they were following the movements of the puppets with their bodies, the voluptuousness of it plain on their faces. Presently, too, some of the capers the old man had missed in Morning-Glory Diary began to appear. Yojirō, the monkey-trainer in The Love of Oshun and Dembei, stepped outside the house to relieve himself before going to bed, and a dog wandered up from somewhere and backed away with the end of his loincloth in its mouth.

It was ten o'clock before the last number, given conspicuous play on the program for its Osaka singer, came on the stage. Shortly after it began, there was a disturbance. A man in a dark-blue jacket buttoned high at the throat, a road-gang foreman he might have been, suddenly jumped up in the pit from the party of five or six he had been drinking with and began challenging someone in the stands to come out and fight. There had been some rancor in the audience, which was divided between supporters of the Osaka singer and local patriots who resented him, and one of the catcalls had particularly annoyed the boss-like gentleman. "Come on out, damn you. Come out," he shouted, and made as if to plunge into the stands. His friends tried to quiet him, but he struck a pose like one of the guardian warriors at a temple gate and continued to bellow, while the rest of the audience shouted their resentment at the noise. The singer from Osaka was quite lost in the turmoil.