The Priest from Tales of Japan
Made by Mary Robinette Kowal and Fred Riley III
Tales of Japan was the first show I did when I worked at Tears of Joy. It was made up of two stories. The Gift was a short piece, about fifteen years old, done on tabletop. The Teakettle of Good Fortune was just a title when I was hired. Fortunately, when I had been very small my father had brought a book of Japanese fairy tales back from a business trip, and Teakettle was one of my favorites. The other piece of Good Fortune was that my partner at the time, Fred Riley, was a good puppet builder.
Since we didn’t have much time we built the show in the style of puppetry most familiar to us; moving-mouth. The priest in the photo is a live hand puppet, which means that one of my hands is in his mouth and the other is in a glove acting as his hand. His other had was sympathetically strung. That means very simply that it’s stuffed. A string runs from the live hand to a pin at the base of the puppet’s neck and then back down to the stuffed hand. So you get some movement from both hands.