Three people to a single puppet. Bunraku, the puppet theatre that grew up in Osaka, works its central illusion through teamwork: one puppet, three handlers—a master for the head and right arm, a second for the left, a third for the feet—breathing together until the wood seems to hold a single life. To one side, a chanter and a shamisen player. The chanter takes on every voice in the story, man and woman, old and young, narrator and lover, all of it carried by one throat. The plots are the old ones of the Edo townsfolk: love suicides, revenge, the unbearable pull between duty and feeling. They made commoners weep three centuries ago, and they still do. What unsettles you is how human the puppets seem—more human, somehow, than people. A head tilts a fraction. A hand trembles. There is no skeleton under the cloth, and yet you would swear the figure is alive. It is a strange art, and Osaka has kept it, carefully, for three hundred years.