Is there a manual for performing a play?

It would be convenient if there were a single volume saying how each role is played, but kabuki has nothing of the kind. The reason is simple: the substance of a kata will not go down onto paper. At what height the hand stops, where the breath is held and where released, what in the other actor's movement cues your entrance — put into words, the essential part falls out. So kabuki's textbook is a person, and the kata passes from master to pupil by voice and by hands physically correcting the body.

That does not mean nothing is written down. Working documents have steadily accumulated: the daichō recording the dialogue; the tsukechō setting out music, effects and the movement of properties; the scenery books noting what is used and how. None of these were made to teach the art — they exist to run the show — but they end up as traces of what was played and how.

This accumulation matters most in reviving a play long absent from the stage. When no one alive has performed it, the evidence is what survives: the script ledgers and cue books, the programmes of the time, stage photographs, and — for later periods — film. These are collated, the kata inferred, the piece rebuilt. What results is not a perfect reproduction but a reconstruction from evidence, and revivals commonly say so.