3.30 p.m. The quiet of the tanjū is shattered by raucous children's songs being played at such a high volume that the melody and lyrics are lost in distortion. Emerging from my house, I notice the small children running out onto the roads in the direction of the carpark, behind the new apartment blocks. I yell at a couple of the children, ‘What's all the noise?’ They yell back, ‘It's the kami shibai man’, without stopping. Like the flute of the Pied Piper, the ‘music’ seems to have a desperate appeal to the small children as they race towards the source. I follow them. In the carpark is a cream-coloured Toyota Corolla station wagon, the back opened, surrounded by about 15 children and a couple of elderly relatives. Standing in the middle of the crowd is a man in his late thirties or early forties. Quite large, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and wearing thick-lensed glasses, his gravelly, high-pitched voice has a remarkable penetrating quality, as he tells the children to calm down.

Set up on the wagon's tailgate is a small wooden frame about one metre square, carved to look like the facade of a theatre stage. Within this frame is a lurid painting of a boy fighting a wolf, blood dripping from the knife in the boy's grasp. The antics of the crowd distract my attention from the painting as I take in the scene that is unfolding around me. The children are all shouting, ‘Ojisan [uncle], I want one of those ones on a stick!’, ‘I want one of those paper thin ones!’ The man is handing out sweets in exchange for ten-yen coins. ‘I've finished it. Look! The middle's still OK.