Mashō

Mashō was an artist who refused to compromise, so exacting about his craft that he rarely accepted commissions and worked with only a handful of puppeteers, Chiyo among them. He held a deep tenderness for Kanyū, the orphaned girl he raised, and though he dreamed of leaving the village to find fresh materials for Hanasaki, he never mustered the confidence to go, haunted by the fear he would turn up nothing.

Mashō was among the very few skilled enough to produce Hanasaki at all, a form of ceramics so demanding that shaping it into precise puppet parts pushed his talent to its limits. His mastery made his work sought after well beyond the village, with Sunagakure regularly commissioning Hanasaki for its puppets. To mark Kanyū as his student he gave her a matching pendant, wearing one himself to signal that he was her teacher.

Hanasaki brought Ceramic Village its renown, but the white clay it required was running dangerously low, and because Mashō would neither abandon the style nor leave to seek more, the village faced ruin once the supply gave out. To prevent that, his son Gōshō secretly murdered Mashō and the other Hanasaki artisans, claiming they had all walked away, and hid their bodies together with the last of the clay in a passage beneath the family home.

The villagers turned to new styles and prospered, yet Kanyū never gave up on Hanasaki. A full decade after Mashō's death she rediscovered its secret entirely on her own, and just afterward she was given his pendant, recovered from his remains by Deidara and Sasori, sealing her place as a Hanasaki master.