Why is the hanamichi on the left side, facing the stage?

The hanamichi is a walkway running from the stage back through the audience. Actors enter along it and depart along it. With the revolving stage, it is a structure the kabuki playhouse evolved for itself and is rarely seen in other theatres. The question is why it runs through the audience's left — the side kabuki calls shimote.

To be honest, there is no established account of why the left. It was built that way in Edo playhouses and has been carried forward. That said, something can be said about it. Kabuki's stage space carries a loose grammar: kamite, the audience's right, is the side of rank, where the highest-ranking figure sits in a palace scene; shimote, the left, is the side from which people come in and out — the side of passage and movement.

The hanamichi is precisely the road by which people appear from the outside world and depart into it. Its being on shimote therefore chimes with the grammar of the space. Which way the causation runs cannot be settled — whether the walkway came first and the grammar formed around it, or the reverse — but the two are held to have grown together. Note also that a staging may call for a second walkway laid temporarily on the right. This is the karihanamichi, and when both are used the whole theatre becomes the space of the story.