It happened that seated right in front of me was another great puppet master, Basil Twist. His range of artistic expression goes way beyond that of the bunraku tradition per se. However, one of his early productions—Dogugaeshi—commissioned by Japan Society in 2003 and revived there several weeks ago, refers to another tradition of Japanese puppetry: the rural puppetry from the island of Awaji, an art Twist discovered at a festival in France, in 1997. This branch of the tradition consists in the main of puppets that are animated sliding rectangular screens. As Twist describes the film he saw in ’97: “On a small black-and-white monitor flashed a sequence of sliding screen doors. It as brief and mysterious, and then it was gone. . . .” For his homage to the tradition, he reproduces that film (or recreates it), so that the audience is launched into the Awaji world from the same base that Twist had been.

In his hour-long, intermissionless Dogugaeshi, Twist presents 88 scenes of different kinds of sliding screens—some constructing rooms, some theaters, some shrines, sometimes in two dimensions, sometimes in three. Eventually, one has the sense that one is being led through a long story. As their history dance unscrolls, a puppet of a fox resembling a lamb keeps popping up as a silent guide. On a rotating platform to the side, the lovely shamisen-and-koto musician Yoko Reikano Kimura plays a many-textured accompaniment. Some of the screens are in sumptuous condition, some are in tatters, some suggest antiquity, a couple suggest the late twentieth century. Only the fox and the musician are not geometric abstractions, and yet how deeply touching the parade of inanimate things becomes.

There is a sizeable team at work on these performances, including Twist and four other puppeteers. I first saw Dogugaeshi at Japan Society a year after it was commissioned; seeing it this fall, some twenty years later, I was astounded by, first, how much emotion it leads one to experience from abstract slides, and, second, how much of its rich detail I’d forgotten.