Kagen Sound, 39, of Denver, Colorado, belongs to a small circle of world masters of the Japanese art of puzzle box creation. Yet nobody taught him how make one. He had to solve the puzzle himself.
Sound was about 8 years old when he saw a puzzle box for the first time. Intriguing and ingenious—the idea stuck in his mind. His parents encouraged him to explore crafts, but it wasn’t until his college years that he got his hands on woodwork. In his free time, he started to visit the school wood shop and learn the craft.
“I have sort of befriended the director of the wood shop. Gradually, he would let me come in there at night and eventually just gave me a key,” he said.
But fiddling around in the wood shop was far cry from crafting a puzzle box. “There wasn’t anyone around who could show me how to make a puzzle box,” he said.
At the time, in late ‘90s, you couldn’t just search Pinterest for puzzle box ideas.
“I was pushed to be really inventive on my own,” he said.
He was inspired by Japanese puzzle boxes from Akio Kamei’s Karakuri Creation Group, but that only gave him ideas, not blueprints.
“Inspiration gave me hope but mostly I used trial and error to test my ideas,” he said.
