女方

Onnagata are male actors who specialize in female roles. The art developed after women were banned from the public stage in the early Edo period; rather than imitating women realistically, onnagata build an idealized femininity out of refined, stylized movement, voice, and costume.

Kabuki's world is complete when tachiyaku (male-role actors) and onnagata share the stage. Great onnagata roles—Agemaki in Sukeroku, Otomi in the story of Yosaburō—carry much of a play's allure.

For a close encounter with the onnagata art, the role of Princess Kumo no Taema in Narukami, one of the Kabuki Jūhachiban, is unforgettable. Sent to the priest Narukami, who has sealed away the rain-bringing dragon god, this beauty undoes his resolve with charm and wit—a drama carried essentially by two figures, its tension sustained by the onnagata's finely calibrated art.

Ayamegusa, the recorded teachings of the great Genroku-era onnagata Yoshizawa Ayame I, is said to set out twenty-nine precepts covering the onnagata's conduct on stage and in daily life. His famous dictum—that one cannot be a fine onnagata without living as a woman in everyday life—speaks to the depth of an art that is lived, not merely performed.

The onnagata art belongs to no single family but sustains kabuki as a whole. Even on the stages of the Ichikawa Sōke, whose house art is the male aragoto style, onnagata roles such as the courtesan Agemaki in Sukeroku carry much of the drama's splendor.