What do the colours of kabuki costume and makeup mean?

Colour in kabuki is information, not decoration. Watch with that premise and the amount you can read the moment the curtain opens rises sharply.

Clearest of all are the colours of kumadori. Red suji-guma — the red strokes exaggerating the run of muscle and vessel across the face — is held to carry youth, vigour and righteous strength; the aragoto hero wears this face. Indigo, by contrast, carries the air of court villains and vengeful spirits, of what is not quite human. Blue-toned lines running across a face are enough to say that this figure is out of the ordinary. Brownish kuma may be used for demons and monsters. The correspondences form a system, so even a first-time viewer quickly gets as far as: red is on our side, blue is an enemy or something frightening.

Costume colour works on the same principle. The akahime — the sheltered princess in red — is a case where the colour itself names the type. Colours of rank go to figures of rank, sober tones to commoners, and courtesans have colours of their own. See the colour and you know which world a figure belongs to. Nothing needs explaining in dialogue, so the pace of the play never drops.

Beyond that, a colour can name a house. The persimmon-brown associated with the Ichikawa line is called Danjūrō-cha and was widely loved in Edo. A colour favoured by an actor became a fashion and then survived as the name of the colour itself — the reach of kabuki in Edo folded into a word for a shade. Learn a little of this vocabulary and the stage gives you measurably more. Begin with the two: red and indigo.