黒御簾

The kuromisu is a small room screened by a black bamboo blind at the side of the stage, on the audience's left. Inside, nagauta singers, shamisen players, and musicians on drums and flutes watch the stage through the blind and play live, breathing with the actors. Their music is called geza ongaku—or kuromisu music.

The playing goes far beyond songs. The narimono percussion is said to conjure wind and rain, the cries of animals, and the eerie sounds that announce a ghost—an unseen director of atmosphere, transforming a scene without ever being seen.

Subtlest of the narimono is the yukioto, the 'sound of snow.' Snow falls in silence—yet kabuki is said to render it audible, striking the great drum softly with mallets whose heads are wrapped in cloth. As the low, muffled beats fill the house, the hush of falling snow somehow rises from them: silence painted in sound, the geza's imagination in a single stroke.

The kuromisu belongs to kabuki as a whole rather than to any one family. Like the kurogo and the ki, it embodies the idea that the unseen sustains the stage—an idea alive in every kabuki performance today, the Ichikawa Sōke's repertoire included.