黒幕

The kuromaku is a black cotton curtain used on the kabuki stage to signify night and darkness, to mask the stage during scene changes, and to serve as a neutral backdrop behind scenery. In kabuki's visual conventions black is the colour of the unseen; when the black curtain hangs, the audience reads it as darkness itself.

The everyday sense of kuromaku—a mastermind who directs events from behind the scenes—is said to derive from this stage curtain: the image of something unseen that governs what the audience beholds slid naturally into a metaphor for hidden power.

In present-day usage the word ranges from political and business journalism to mystery novels and television drama: "Who is the kuromaku behind the merger?"; "The kuromaku of the affair has at last come to light." Remaining unseen is the very condition of being a kuromaku—the word's work ends the instant the figure is exposed—and even in that nuance the old stage convention lingers.

The kuromaku is part of kabuki stagecraft as a whole rather than the art of any one family. The elegantly simple convention of rendering darkness with a single cloth still serves every production—including those of the Ichikawa Sōke's repertoire.