すっぽん

The suppon is a small stage trap set into the hanamichi at the spot called shichisan, partway between stage and auditorium. By long-standing convention it is used only for those beyond the human—sorcerers, apparitions, ghosts, creatures of fantasy.

The figure rises slowly, head first, sometimes wreathed in smoke—another world yawning open in the middle of the audience. It is one of kabuki's most striking ideas: the supernatural appears not at a distance on stage, but at your side.

The curious name is said to come from the creature itself: an actor rising head-first from the trap resembles a soft-shelled turtle stretching its neck from its shell. It is an oddly endearing name for a piece of stage machinery—and the way eeriness and humor live side by side in it is kabuki through and through.

The suppon itself belongs to kabuki as a whole, yet beings beyond the human—wrathful deities and vengeful spirits—also fill the Kabuki Jūhachiban plays handed down in the Ichikawa Sōke (the head family of the Ichikawa Danjūrō lineage), such as Narukami and Fudō. The imagination that summons supernatural power onto the stage resonates deeply with the spirit of aragoto.