だんまり

Danmari—written with characters meaning "struggle in the dark"—is a stylized scene set in some lonely mountain pass or riverbank, where the principal characters grope through darkness, silently searching and struggling over a treasure. Slow, dance-like movement and distinctive offstage music define it; the stage stays bright, and only the audience sees everything.

Said to have begun in Edo's kaomise season-opening productions in the 1770s, danmari grew as a festive device for displaying a company's actors in full costume all at once. It is a moment to savor pictorial beauty, music, and the sheer presence of the performers, more than plot.

Danmari are broadly divided, it is said, into two kinds. The jidai danmari unfolds its formal beauty at a remote mountain shrine, a treasure sought in silence; the sewa danmari is woven into murder scenes and the endings of ghost plays, transfiguring the atmosphere—scenes of Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan are cited among its examples. Some, like Miyajima no Danmari, are even performed as independent pieces.

Rather than any one family's art, danmari belongs to kabuki as a whole—an aesthetics of shared convention nurtured by the Edo stage. Its paradox of showing darkness in full light breathes the same theatrical spirit that produced aragoto.