Normally, I despise puppets, marionettes, and their wooden brethren. But the artistry of director/adapter Ping Chong, production designer Mitsuru Ishii, and the puppeteers from the Center of Puppetry Arts is so exquisitely hypnotic, I surrendered to Chong's charms. And the trio of Japanese ghost stories adapted from the 1904 work by Lafcadio Hearn glow with a quiet intensity that I found quite unique. "Jhininiki" was a weird, ghoulish beginning. The title character turns out to be something like a Japanese vampire, condemned for his sins in life to sustain himself after death by feasting on dead human flesh. "Hoichi" is a blind boy summoned by a monster to play for dead warriors of a bygone war.
The evening is capped by the amusingly updated "O-Tei," in which a dying girl makes good on a promise to come back to her fiance in another form in her next life. The supernatural reunion occurs under the golden arches of a McDonald's! There is nothing silly or infantile in this enchanting 64-minute gem. It mesmerizes with its slow oriental pace and formality, sparkling with beautifully executed detail, satisfying deeply.
