通し狂言

Tōshi kyōgen means performing one play whole, from its opening act to its final scene. Its counterpart is the midori program, which assembles a day's bill from the famous acts and dances of several different works.

Until around mid-Meiji, kabuki was generally performed in full; thereafter the midori format became the norm. Today a tōshi production feels all the more special—the story's causes and consequences unfold complete—and the format is welcomed by newcomers who can follow the plot from end to end.

The power of the full-length format is caught in the nickname of Kanadehon Chūshingura: "the theatre's dokujintō," after a restorative tonic brewed from ginseng. Whenever houses grew thin, a full production of the play would revive the box office without fail—a saying already recorded, it is said, in Edo-period writing, and eloquent testimony to the force of a story told whole from beginning to end.

Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII Hakuen has repeatedly staged the full-length Raijin Fudō Kitayama Zakura since his Ebizō years. This five-act history play, said to have been premiered in Osaka by Danjūrō II (then Ebizō), contains the stories of Narukami, Kenuki, and Fudō, and is famous for its five-role quick changes—the family's own way of offering its inherited plays as one grand evening's tale.