What kinds of kabuki wig are there — and does a house have wigs of its own?

Kabuki wigs run to a startling number of forms — some thousand for male roles, four hundred for female. This is not ornament: the wig carries the explanation of a character. Warrior or townsman, young or old, respectable wife or courtesan, well kept or fallen on hard times — all of it is declared by the shape of the topknot and the way it is dressed. From the moment the curtain opens, an audience can read a good deal of a person from the hair alone.

One axis of classification is how the back hair is dressed. For male roles the tabo comes in abura-tsuki, hardened with oil and set close, and fukuro-tsuki, given volume as it is bound up. Oil-dressed wigs carry further finishes such as togidashi, so that even the raising of the sheen is fixed as form. The same role reads differently under a different dressing: the tight oil-set carries propriety, the fuller shape a certain softness.

As to the second half of the question — whether a house has wigs of its own. There is a form called the masakari. The name comes from the shape at the temples, which resembles a masakari, a great axe; it is held to be the same style worn by the Kaga tobi, the firefighters retained by the Maeda house of Kaga. In Edo it was reckoned a dashing, manly shape.

And when that wig is worn at a kōjō — the formal address at a name-succession — the Ichikawa main house wears the abura-tsuki masakari while actors of the wider line wear the fukuro-tsuki, as the Naritaya's own site records. The same masakari, dressed two ways, marks the difference between the head house and the line. Who wears what on stage states the relations of a family outright. This is what is meant by saying a wig is not a mere covering. Such particulars differ from house to house, and cannot be described uniformly from outside.