Author: Street Kamishibai. Gataro & Yaeko?
Title: [Shinigami Musume : 13 kan]. [& 23].
Description: np. Sadamusha? 195-? Ten handpainted and varnished sheets on heavy boards, 26x36cm. Text handwritten on the back. Edges worn and minor scrapes and blemishes as expected. Stamps of the Osaka and Nagoya kamishibai ethics committees, which my informant speculates were self proclaimed entities that existed nowhere other than as stamps on a handful of stories.Added is the wrecked but complete episode 23, also ten cards. The left hand quarter has been wet and is quite damaged but it is certainly worth saving. ¶ If you've looked at published kamishibai and wondered how it could ever have been popular ... it wasn't. The published stuff was almost all heavy handed propaganda and improving drivel produced without any artistic skill or imagination by government and education agencies and pressed on children in schools. Real street kamishibai was produced by hand by the kamishibai men themselves or by associations - such as the Sadamusha - that acted more or less as lending libraries. Which is not to say that a hell of a lot of street kamishibai wouldn't be described kindly as 'naive'. But enough had to be compelling to bring and keep audiences. Specially through hundreds of episodes, which some stories ran for.Kamishibai was not long lived. It was more or less born with cinema and died with television, and the greatest works, as far as they have survived, were produced toward the end, during the occupation after the war. The connection to film serials is inescapable of course but kamishibai is not burdened with technical restraints. If you can imagine it, you can draw it and you can tell the story.This is the complete episode 13 of what might be translated as 'Death's Daughter' which I'm told is a story of horror and revenge but I doubt that anyone living knows the whole story. As far as I can figure, when the kamishibai industry ground to a halt the kamishibai men just packed away, or threw away, whatever episodes they had. If a large hunk of a story or, something I've never seen, a whole story was held by the association you can be sure it was dull, rarely used. Here, I've traced only episodes 10 to 15* which all seem to have come from the same source. How many episodes were there? Who knows.*Episode 23, now added from the same source and unlikely to be supplemented, doesn't help with the plot but it does ratchet up the tension. Is it all as brutally murderous as this? I suspect so.It's pretty fabulous, no Golden Yasha but a fair slice of that essential overwrought pervasive dread and stark fear.Kamishibai are public stories usually told by kamishibai men who set up a folding stand on the back of their bicycles and acted the dramas illustrated on the cards. With the plates in order, the text for the first picture is on the back of the last. The sheets are transferred to the back as the story continues; the text for the second picture is on the back of the first, and so on.

Keywords: graphic art street kamishibai thrillers fiction c20th Japan cinema theatre performing arts meiji