Lifelike.(puppet theater)

Japanese puppetry takes its great power from the fact that it is very realistic and very artificial at the same time. As was proved again by the Awaji Puppet Theatre Company's recent season at Japan Society--its first New York appearance in eleven years--what strikes you first is the realism. The puppeteers seem to have spent five centuries (that is the genre's estimated age, at minimum) working out the precise rhythm with which a weeping woman would dab her eyes with her sleeve, or the exact wobble with which a drunken god would raise to his mouth his fourth, as opposed to his third, cup of sake. Donald Keene, in his 1965 book "Bunraku" (the Bunraku tradition grew from ...