捨て台詞

A sutezerifu is, in its original sense, a short unscripted line spoken on the spur of the moment—chiefly at an entrance or an exit—that could sketch the air of an Edo street in a single phrase. It laid the actor's skill bare, and many such improvisations are said to have settled, in time, into fixed convention.

In everyday Japanese the meaning has shifted: to "spit a sutezerifu" is to fling a parting shot—a bitter last word on the way out. Only the scene of an exit survived the journey; the modern word's negative colour makes it one of the sharper departures from a term's theatrical origin.

In present-day usage: "'See if I ever come back!' he spat as a sutezerifu and stormed out of the shop"; "She left the meeting room with a parting sutezerifu." The word pairs almost invariably with verbs of spitting out and leaving behind—for these are words flung away at the moment of departure—and even in everyday speech the theatrical scene of an exit remains sharply intact.

Sutezerifu testifies to kabuki's openness to the actor's improvisation. The path by which an invention born of a moment's breath hardens into transmitted form mirrors how kabuki's kata—including those of the Ichikawa Sōke's art—came to be.