奈落

The naraku is the space that spreads beneath the stage and the hanamichi runway. Housing the revolving stage, the seri lifts, and the suppon trap, it is the theatre's hidden engine room, supporting entrances, exits, and transformations from below. The name is said to derive from a Buddhist word for hell—a transcription of the Sanskrit naraka—because the dark, seemingly bottomless space under the stage evoked the underworld.

In everyday Japanese the word survives above all in the phrase naraku no soko—"the bottom of the abyss"—for a plight from which there is no climbing out. In the Edo period, stagehands are said to have turned the revolving stage by hand down in the naraku; the image of that dark labour beneath the stage's brilliance deepens the word's shadows.

The revolving stage of the present Kabukiza is said to measure roughly eighteen meters across, with machinery reaching some 16.5 meters below the boards—among the largest in Japan. A space the height of a several-story building lies sunk beneath the audience's sight, keeping a depth worthy of the name naraku to this day.

In present-day usage the word appears in sentences like "When the stock price collapsed, I felt hurled to the bottom of the naraku," or "One step from the championship, the team sank into the naraku"—wherever a sudden plunge from the heights must be told. Its force lies in compressing the whole distance between summit and abyss into a single word.

Naraku belongs to the machinery of the theatre as a whole rather than to any single house. Every stage—including those of the Ichikawa Sōke (the head family of the Ichikawa Danjūrō lineage)—stands upon this space below and the unseen work done there.