The Master Puppeteer was published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1975, winning the National Book Award for Children’s Literature. Set in eighteenth-century Osaka during a devastating famine, the novel follows Jiro, a boy who becomes an apprentice at the Hanaza puppet theater to escape his family’s poverty.
The Hanaza is run by Yoshida Kinshi’s father, the master puppeteer — a tyrant in art and in life, demanding perfection from his apprentices while the city starves around them. Meanwhile, a Robin Hood figure called Saburo robs wealthy merchants and distributes food to the poor. Jiro gradually realizes that Saburo’s identity is connected to the theater — that the same institution dedicated to beauty and artifice is also involved in the dangerous work of justice.
Paterson draws on her years living in Japan (she was a missionary’s wife) to render Osaka’s puppet theater tradition (bunraku) with authority and respect. The puppets — two-thirds life size, requiring three operators each — become a metaphor for the novel’s themes: the relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer, between art and reality, between the beautiful surface and the hidden hands that control it.
The novel asks whether art is an escape from social reality or a form of engagement with it — whether the theater’s beauty is complicit with injustice (distracting people from their suffering) or opposed to it (preserving human dignity in the face of degradation).
Collecting The Master Puppeteer
First edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1975): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $8–$20