The story man

Mumbai has a few remaining sidewalk-booksellers in the Flora Fountain area downtown. Years ago there were many more, among them some that were ‘specialized’ – books only on travel or law, or medical volumes, while others had a mixed collection of anything from novels to children’s books to old first editions. You took your time, bending over, half-squatting, trying hard not to topple the unsteady pile as a book at the very bottom caught your attention. You ignored the looks of annoyed office goers to whom your irritating dawdling on the crowded pavement ate into their lunch-hour by a whole minute.

Recently, the sellers have created more accessible stands and shelves, and there last week I found a worn copy of a children’s illustrated book, Allen Say’s “Kamishibai Man”. It must have been a favorite of the young owner whose name is scrawled proudly on the first page: “This book belongs to: J. J. Davis.”

On the one hour train ride back to Malad, I open the book and begin to read, first guessing at what the initials “J.J.” might stand for. Was J.J. a girl or a boy? Was J.J. all grown up now? Was J.J. a visitor to Mumbai, or did J.J. live someplace in this same city?

As I turn the pages, delighting in the lovely illustrations, I flip back in time to an evening some years ago in Tokyo. I was walking down the street by a park, still not sure if I was truly, distractedly lost or whether I could calm down and find my way to the corner where Masami had left me some hours before.

I had followed the sound of some wooden clappers and the happy laughter of a bunch of children. Curious to find out what was happening, I walked up towards them and realized that there was a man in the lead with the wooden sticks, and the children skipped behind – shades of the Pied Piper, I thought, and followed them too. We soon got to a corner where he had left a bicycle on which stood a wooden chest with drawers over which was propped open a kind of frame.

By then there was a small crowd of adults and children, and one of the parents smiled widely at me and nodded towards the man saying, “Story Man.”

Story Man? Oh,yes. I was going to wait and see this!

What I did see was this man first open up the drawers and sell some brightly colored candy to his audience. For the next fifteen minutes or so, he drew out some large boards with pictures on one side and some kind of text on the back, and told a story complete with bird whistles, different voices and sound effects. There was a flute strapped to his bicycle, and I guessed that he sometimes used it in his tellings. Of course I did not understand a word – and the vocabulary in English of the helpful parent I turned to for help stopped at “Yes, yes, Story-Man” - but I enjoyed the performance all the same. There was such a lively exchange created by Story Man and all the different voices he was using in the short telling; the adults present seemed to be enjoying it even more than the children.

Masami was skeptical when I told her what had delayed me. “You traveled back in time too, perhaps? So I really must forgive you,” she told me, adding at my puzzled look that while the Kamishibai-shi was a fairly common feature of her childhood, she had not come across one in at least twenty years, nor did she think that today’s Japanese children who seemed to be growing cell-phones and electronic games gizmos from their finger tips would pay attention to these story-tellers any more.

I was eager to find out more and Masami’s aunts were happy to fill me in when we visited them that weekend. They told me that they remembered that several times a week, a storyteller would arrive on a bicycle carrying not only his boards but also a wooden box packed with candy and rice crackers.

To get the kids' attention and draw a crowd, the storyteller would stand on the street corner and bang a pair of wooden clappers together. Once he had gathered a large enough audience, the storyteller would start by selling candy and crackers for the kids to eat during his performance. Then, when they had settled down before him, the performance would begin. As he told his story, the storyteller showed the picture boards to the children in order. There were some favorites they wanted told again and again, but whenever he declared he had a new one, the sales of his snacks would go up and they squirmed and wiggled in anticipation, waiting for him to begin.

Kami-shibai, the words literally means "paper-theater", is named for the large picture cards the storyteller uses to present a story to an audience. Parts of the story were printed on the backs of the cards to help the teller remember the story and to make sure the story matched the pictures. Cleverly, the text for picture-card number one, was printed on the back of card two, which then got slotted in front of card one, yet carried it’s text on the back of card three. The storyteller would usually appear in the evening when the children finished school. Typically, the stories were told in serial fashion, and were of the classic cliff-hanger "to be continued" type - that ensured audiences came back again and again, to buy candy and to hear the next episode of the story.

Later I learnt that Kamishibai in this form was one of the few forms of entertainment that was available, specially for children of lower-income families. It was enormously popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, especially the times during and directly after the war when so much else had been destroyed, and many adults were out of work. Estimates suggest that around the 1940s, there must have been about at least 3,000 storytellers around Tokyo; yet by the 50s their popularity was already declining mainly because of television. Yet, it is quite telling that television was initially referred to as denki kamishibai, or “electric kamishibai.” But as Japan became increasingly affluent, the story-man became less popular, and many gave up this work.

Researchers suggest that the kamishibai picture form shows up in early versions of manga, the printed Japanese comics that soon became very popular, and was also in some ways a predecessor of anime, or animated Japanese cartoons.

In Allen Say’s book that I was luck to find, the story tells of an elderly Kamishibai man who decides to return to the city after many years, and to spend the day on his former rounds. His wife makes candies for him to sell just as she used to in the past, and he sets off on his bicycle. But things have changed. There is a lot of noisy and disturbing traffic moving up and down, with loudly honking horns, and when he sees that the beautiful trees have been cut down to make place for the shops and restaurants, he wonders: Who needs to buy so many things and eat so many different foods? He finally finds a place, sets up his theater and begins to tell his personal story of being a kamishibai man in a flashback sequence. Soon he is surrounded by adults who remember him and his stories from their youth. Ironically, that night he is featured on the news on television, the very technology that replaced him.

When I wrote about my book find to Masami, she told me that actually, kamishibai has not entirely died out. These days, Kamishibai stories for schools, covering a variety of subjects, are still being published and used throughout Japan. A revival is also seen at various theatre offerings, and outdoor events and festivals, and an engaging form of this revival is the Tezukuri kamishibai (hand-made kamishibai) festivals, where people of all ages tell kamishibai stories using boards they have illustrated themselves.

She believes, like I do, that wherever there are still people who want to come together and share their stories, kamishibai will always have a special place.

May you find ways to help keep the wonderful Tradition of Story alive.

Marguerite Theophil

We are profoundly indebted to the bards, artists and storytellers,
who cherished these insights through dark times
and delivered them safely to us.
We need them badly.
~ Robert Johnson