楽屋

The gakuya is the backstage realm where actors—and the musicians, costumers, wig masters, and prop hands around them—prepare and rest. The word is said to go back to gagaku court music: the gakuya was where the musicians played and the dancers robed, and in time it came to mean the green room itself.

In the playhouses of Edo, an actor's room is said to have been assigned by role and rank, the floor plan itself mirroring the order of the company. Nor is the gakuya a mere waiting room: before the mirror, through makeup and costume, the actor passes gradually into the role—a quiet sanctuary behind the stage.

The gakuya is also a treasury of everyday Japanese: gakuya-ura, "backstage," for inside circumstances; gakuya-banashi for insiders' talk; gakuya-ochi for a joke only the initiated catch. All were born in the world behind the curtain—theatre words that have deepened the language itself.

Gakuya is a word of kabuki as a whole. The kumadori of the Ichikawa Sōke, too, is painted before the dressing-room mirror—and this quiet hour before the curtain is where every performance truly begins.