Did kabuki contain "riddle" elements from the beginning?

Edo audiences were masters at reading the devices laid across the stage — and this is no exaggeration: the method of playwriting presupposed it. Many kabuki works begin by choosing a sekai, a story-world everyone knows — the Soga brothers' vendetta, the tale of Yoshitsune — and then overlay a shukō, a fresh conceit. Because the audience knows the world, it sees at once where this staging has turned. The slap of the knee at a good twist was itself part of the work.

The devices are not only in the plot. Costume motifs and hand properties carried meaning too: a pattern hinting at a character's origins, an object planted as a seed for a later turn. Such mitate registers with those who catch it and passes as ornament for those who do not. The same stage reaches different depths depending on how much the viewer brings.

So too with wordplay. When the thieves of a shiranami play announce themselves, rhymed lines pile one on another, and the pleasure lies in the run of sound as much as in the sense. Jiguchi — punning play on words — is salted through the dialogue. Kabuki, in short, was from the beginning a theatre that trusted its audience to decode; it never assumed a passive viewer. That design survives intact in performance today.