What Fuwa Bansaku Found

This short, haunting piece requires the reader to advance (a) or retreat (r), with a variety of other actions suggested after you look at or examine the scenery. It's very linear, but like much great character-driven interactive fiction, the linearity feels natural as you discover your character and what their limitations and compulsions are.

Interspersed throughout the work are fragments of poetry from Basho, Kikaku, and other 17th-century poets. The end result is a haunting, elegiac work, telling a stylized version of the semi-historical story of Fuwa Bansaku, a 16th-century samurai.

Near the end, the work features a ukiyo-e print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, a 19th-century japanese woodblock printer; this famous image from his series, 100 Ghost Stories of China and Japan, seems to be the inspiration for this short and dramatic ekphrastic piece.

This is a beautiful use of the format and a moving, haunting piece, which should inspire the reader to learn more about Yoshitoshi, the poets, and of course, Fuwa Bansaku. Very lovely.

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