二枚目

Edo-period playhouses advertised with rows of billboards bearing the names and likenesses of the troupe's actors. The second board is said to have customarily carried the gentle romantic lead—the lover of the wagoto line—so the role, and the actor who played it, came to be called nimaime, "the second board."

In everyday Japanese today, nimaime simply means a handsome man. Derivatives such as nimaime-han—a leading man with a comic streak—followed, and a word born from the order of theatre billboards settled deep into the vocabulary of everyday character description.

To meet a nimaime on stage, seek out Yosaburō in Yowa Nasake Ukina no Yokogushi, held to be the role's representative example. In the gentle, white-faced lover swept along by an extraordinary fate, the air of the billboard era that coined the word nimaime becomes something felt on the skin.

In everyday use today one says "He's the office nimaime," or "Usually such a nimaime—yet at the party he gladly plays the sanmaime," the word taking in bearing and manner as well as looks. A term born from the order of billboards still serves as a measure for describing character.

Nimaime derives from kabuki's role types and billboard culture as a whole. Its gentle style stands apart from the bravura aragoto that is the Ichikawa Sōke's hereditary art—yet the word itself tells how aragoto and wagoto, paired in contrast, have together shaped kabuki's appeal.