Are there roles kabuki actors dream of as children?

To grow up in a kabuki house is to have the great roles present in the ordinary landscape. In a month when the father plays Benkei in Kanjinchō, the household's talk, the sounds of rehearsal and the air of the theatre all turn around that role. The child comes and goes in the dressing rooms, looks up from the wings, watches the costume being assembled at close quarters. The distance is nothing like that of children in other trades.

The longing therefore tends to take the shape of the house's art. Born into the Ichikawa line, a child sees the heroes of the Kabuki Jūhachiban rise before him as goals — Kamakura Gongorō of Shibaraku, Sukeroku, Benkei of Kanjinchō. In the Otowaya it might be the handsome men of the domestic plays; the outline of the longing differs by house. And crucially, it is a longing for roles one may one day actually carry. Not an unreachable dream but a goal awaiting its turn.

This, though, is only the general pattern. What any actor actually longed for differs from person to person. Some were drawn strongly to roles outside their house's art; some longed not for a role at all but for the figure of a particular actor. What this page can offer is the general tendency. The inner life of any individual can be told only in his own words.