新歌舞伎

Shin-kabuki is the collective name for kabuki plays written between the late Meiji and early Shōwa eras by independent authors unattached to any theatre. Kabuki scripts had always come from in-house playwrights, but after Kawatake Mokuami's death in 1893 no major successor emerged, and works by novelists and men of letters entered the repertoire.

Representative works include Tsubouchi Shōyō's Kiri Hitoha, Okamoto Kidō's Shuzenji Monogatari and Banchō Sarayashiki, and Mayama Seika's Genroku Chūshingura—modern minds and modern portraits rendered through kabuki technique. The movement is said to have peaked in the Taishō era, and many of its plays now stand beside the classics.

A term easily confused with shin-kabuki is shinsaku kabuki, "newly written kabuki": plays composed from the wartime and postwar years onward are generally given this separate name. The Super Kabuki founded by Ichikawa Ennosuke III and stagings drawn from manga and anime belong to this newer lineage—proof that kabuki's habit of growing by absorbing new scripts, which shin-kabuki exemplified, is alive to this day.

The lineage continued after the war: Wakaki Hi no Nobunaga ("Nobunaga in His Youth"), written by Osaragi Jirō for Ichikawa Danjūrō XI (then Ebizō), is said to have premiered in 1952. Handed down through the successive Danjūrō, it exemplifies how a modern script can become part of a family's art.