クドキ

Kudoki names the scene in a gidayū kyōgen in which a female character pleads her innermost feelings. Though the leading roles of such plays are usually male, in the kudoki the onnagata takes center stage, emotion foremost, moving in near-dance stylization to the shamisen and the takemoto narration.

The word kudoki also denotes a structural unit in Japanese music—in heikyoku, noh chant, and jōruri—and survives as a form name in folk song. In kabuki dance the kudoki almost always portrays a woman's aching heart, folding waves of feeling into restrained movement: the essence of the onnagata's art.

Among the most celebrated kudoki is the "Sakaya" (sake shop) scene of Hadesugata Onna Maiginu. Osono, sick with worry for her missing husband, begins: "Right now, my Hanshichi—where can you be, and how?" This kudoki is held to be the heart of the act, treasured on the kabuki stage as on the puppet stage: the onnagata's supreme art of feeling overflowing from a figure held almost still.

Kudoki belongs to kabuki as a whole rather than to any one house. It is the still, inward counterpart to the explosive aragoto that is the Ichikawa Sōke's house art—and only with both poles in view does the full amplitude of kabuki come into focus.