松羽目物

Matsubamemono are dance pieces adapted from the Noh and Kyōgen repertoire and staged in a style close to the originals. The matsubame is a wooden panel painted with a great old pine, modeled on the mirror board of the Noh stage; together with a side door and curtained entrance, it conjures a Noh theatre within the kabuki playhouse.

The genre is said to begin with Kanjinchō, first performed by Ichikawa Danjūrō VII in 1840. In the Meiji era, Danjūrō IX, Onoe Kikugorō V, and others created many works in this style—Funa Benkei, Tsuchigumo—establishing it as kabuki's most classically refined vein.

The great pine itself carries a lineage. The tree painted on the Noh stage's mirror board is said to depict the Yōgō Pine standing on the approach to Kasuga Taisha shrine in Nara—a sacred tree held to be a dwelling place of the god of the performing arts, before which arts are still offered at the Wakamiya Onmatsuri festival. To perform before the matsubame is to carry into kabuki that older memory: art offered up before the pine where the deity resides.

That the genre itself is traced to the Ichikawa Sōke's Kanjinchō speaks to how deeply the Danjūrō line is woven into kabuki's history. As the centerpiece of the Kabuki Jūhachiban, the role of Benkei has been carried by generation after generation of Danjūrō.