幕切れ

Makugire is the closing of the curtain at the end of an act, and the scene of that closing. In kabuki it is never a mere stop: a mie locks into place, the ki clappers sound, the curtain runs—every element a calculated climax, with refined staging handed down for each play.

In everyday Japanese, an affair may come to "an abrupt makugire" or "a dramatic makugire"—the word denotes how something ends. It carries the theatrical intuition that an ending reveals the character of the whole, inheriting the lingering resonance of the stage curtain's fall.

The subtlety of the makugire deepens one step further in the close of Kanjinchō. Even after the curtain has been drawn, Benkei remains alone outside it and exits down the hanamichi in the leaping tobi-roppō—a makusoto ("outside the curtain") staging that sets one more climax beyond the curtain's fall, celebrated as kabuki's way of raising the very act of ending into an art.

In present-day usage: "The long negotiation came to a quiet makugire—a single handshake"; "The uproar reached an unexpected makugire." To see the close of an event in the image of a falling curtain is proof that Japanese still narrates the world with the theatre's breathing.

Makugire belongs to the shared language of kabuki performance. The timed breath in which the curtain runs to the sound of the ki is an aesthetic common to every play and every actor—the closing moments of the Ichikawa Sōke's stages included.