Umbrellas appear constantly in kabuki — are they only for rain?

Watch kabuki for a while and you notice how often umbrellas appear — carried on when no rain is falling, held through long stretches of dance. This is because an umbrella does several jobs at once, and shielding from rain is only one of them.

First, it renders custom and setting. Umbrellas and hats belong to scenes of going out in the rain or of travel — and they also carry the bustle of a festival onto the stage. The flower parasols the young monks hold in Musume Dōjōji are decked with blossoms and would keep off no rain at all; they exist to make the dance splendid. So too the furidashi-gasa of the same piece, three hats linked so that they spill out one after another when shaken: no use whatever, and entirely for the eye.

Second, it enlarges an entrance. The hero of Sukeroku comes down the hanamichi with a snake-eye umbrella and takes a long time over his entrance. With it, his outline grows far beyond the body alone: opened, it makes a circle; tilted, it throws light and shade across the face; spun, it multiplies the movement. Against an entrance with empty hands, a single umbrella changes the acreage of the stage.

Third, the handling is itself an art. Opening, closing, spinning, shouldering, tilting to hide the face — each has its settled form, and performed in sequence they become a dance. The umbrella is thus a place where an actor's skill shows. Note too that stage umbrellas are said to be built to open wider than ordinary ones, so that from the second and third tiers the umbrella does not come between the audience and the actor's face. The properties are made with sightlines from every seat in mind — another mark of how finely kabuki's staging is calculated.