Hi everyone, This one's pretty self-explanatory - I'm looking for a little information about Japanese puzzle boxes. That is, himitsu-bako (as far as I can tell, although I've seen some people call them karakuri, which I think more means the actual mechanism - or may have nothing to do with it at all). In my opening sequence, I want to feature one of these, and have something released from it. Essentially all I'm after is a little more information - the scene takes place in a museum, so someone there is going to know at least a little about the box. From what I can find on google, these things originated either 200 or 100 years ago - 200 sounds a lot more impressive, but I don't want to be ignorant about this one. Other than that, all I've found (apart from the basic nature of how they work) is that there are a lot of them for sale on Amazon. As well as their rough origin, and perhaps any interesting details about them that you might know, I want to know if basically they could just be broken instead of actually opened. I know that might sound stupid (anything can be broken, right?*) but I want the thing inside to be very well protected, so maybe we can't just shoot the box. Maybe we can. Who knows. I understand this is an obscure area, but any help would be great! One final thing - anyone know anything about Japanese mythology? From what I know it's crazy and interesting and all trees with face-fruits and people with long legs and long arms and fire-breathing chickens, but what I really want to know is, is there any creature in Japanese mythology that looks like/has the traits of a worm or a snake? Preferrably a worm but the closest thing works! Thank you, Piper
Since you're creating a special puzzle box that will have some unusual function in your story, it's perfectly fine to make your box in possession of some similarly unusual qualities. It may be older than the boxes we know in existence but hey, that makes it extra special. If it's extremely hard to break (as required by the story), that's also fine, because yep, it's extra special and made with extra care and an intention to be super-difficult to break. There are tons of results on Japanese myth snakes and worms once you google that, so I'll leave you to do this for yourself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_creatures_from_Japan Neat stuff. Always go to Wikipedia before Google for a question like that.
