When Kizaemon dies, handing down his manufacture to his 21-year-old son, a woman in her thirties named Tamae shows up in the village and asks Kisuke to allow her to say a prayer at his father' grave.

A few weeks later, Kisuke looks for Tamae in Aware, discovering that she is working as a prostitute in the town's illegal pleasure quarters and that his father had once been a regular client of hers.

When the head clerk of a Kyoto based artware store, Chūbei, arrives in Takekami for a business call, he recognises Tamae from her early years as a prostitute whom he often frequented.

[2] In his 2004 obituary for Mizukami in The Independent, James Kirkup described Bamboo Dolls of Echizen as being "full of […] peculiar local colour" and "a fascinating ethnographical study of a primitive and spooky culture".

[3] Bamboo Dolls of Echizen was published in an English translation provided by Dennis Washburn in 2008 as part of a two-novella-anthology (the other being Mizukami's 1961 The Temple of the Wild Geese).