The+Master+Puppeteer

Jiro lives in poverty. His father is a puppet maker for Yoshida, one of the most famous puppeteers in Osaka. The little money they receive for the puppet making goes towards food, which is scarce. There is a "robber" going around, called Saburo, stealing food and giving it to the poor. When Jiro and his father, Hanji, are delivering a puppet to Yoshida, Yoshida asks if he could hire Jiro as a hand in the Hanaza. Jiro is hired, which means he has to move into the Hanaza with the other boys. Kinshi, the senior boy, is Yoshida's son. He helps Jiro with his work. Work is very hard at the Hanaza. The boys are often beat if they do something wrong while practicing for a performance, and Kinshi is beaten by his father when he is practicing with him. When Jiro goes up to Yoshida's home, because he needs to "borrow" a script for the next performance, he notices a strangely shaped basket, which looks like the masks that Saburo's followers wear. There are many performances of a certain play, called //The Thief of Tokaido,// but, when the thief Saburo calls a demand performance of this play, the authorities show up. During the play, the guards are all tied up, and the Hanaza is closed down for a while. When it opens back up, the boys in the Hanaza are doing many more things than usual. Once, when Jiro goes to the storehouse(a place no one is allowed) to practice, he finds a samurai sword on one of the rafters in the ceiling. He begins to be suspicious. Jiro's father goes missing, and large groups of poor people(called night rovers) are becoming dangerous. Kinshi is starting to go missing on occasion, and Jiro is worried. He is suspecting that Yoshida might be Saburo, and that Kinshi is one of his followers. One night, Jiro plans on finding Saburo and showing him to Kinshi, he goes to Okada, an old blind man who is one of the chanters for the puppet shows. Jiro plans on showing Okada the sword he found and telling him that Saburo is Yoshida, but when Jiro goes to collect the sword, it isn't there. Then he finds out that it is Okada who is Saburo. Jiro runs, and when he leaves the Hanaza, he finds that the night rovers are out, and that the whole city is on fire. Jiro runs into his father, who is helping fight the fire. Then Jiro gets into his father's fireman suit to disguise himself, and when he finally finds his mother(and Kinshi, who had disappeared earlier), he claims that Kinshi is his brother. Kinshi had gotten his hand cut off. Then the whole truth comes out. Yoshida had been working for Okada the whole time, and Okada is really the master puppeteer.

I learned that there is lots of work put into the puppet shows that are put on in Japan. I learned that many poor people had to fight for food.

I really liked this book. I like the mystery in not knowing who Saburo was, I liked how Kinshi was able to withstand his father's beatings, and I liked just the general content. Katherine Paterson is an amazing author.