How ‘Kokuho’ has led to a resurgence in kabuki theater in Japan

Kokuho’s story takes many twists and turns, beginning in 1964 and following the relationship between Kikuo (played as a youth by Monster’s Sōya Kurokawa and as an adult by Ryo Yoshizawa) and Shunsuke (Keitatsu Koshiyama as a teen and Ryusei Yokohama as an adult)—adoptive brothers, friends, costars, and sometimes rivals—over the course of 50 years. They are onnagata, meaning they specialize in playing female roles; women were banned from the stage early in kabuki’s history due to the form’s association with sex work, and it remains male dominated. 

Shunsuke was born into this tradition, the son of esteemed kabuki actor Hanai Hanjiro II (played by Ken Watanabe, whose real-life fame and reputation shade that of his character). Kikuo was born into a yakuza family, but is adopted by Hanai after his father’s murder by a rival clan. Hanai raises the two boys to take the stage themselves, relentlessly training them in every aspect of the form. The man expects perfection, and despite Kikuo’s less-esteemed background, he proves to have a greater natural talent for the rigors of kabuki performance than Shunsuke. The question of who will inherit Hanai’s name as a performer becomes fraught, and as the years pass, further twists and turns alternatively drive Kikuo and Shunsuke together and apart as they pursue separate paths to artistic glory.

Hanai Hanjiro II (Ken Watanabe, center) trains his sons in the art of kabuki theater.

©SHUICHI YOSHIDA/ASP ©2025 "KOKUHO" Film Partners

Kabuki has fitfully been a subject for Japanese film and television before, notably in a few classics like Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) and Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1963). Kokuho also owes a lot to the 1993 China/Hong Kong film Farewell My Concubine, which is similarly about two actors in a traditional theater setting and takes place over many years. Kokuho director Lee Sang-il has acknowledged its influence. There’s a natural synthesis between the sensibilities of cinema and this style of theater. The dances and dramatic gestures of kabuki may be superficially broad, but they demand extreme physical control. A film camera can study both the macro—the ornate stages and costuming—and the micro—the finer details of the iconic kumadori makeup, or the nuances of an actor’s face—in a kabuki performance. The film trains the audience in recognizing the skill involved. As part of their training, Hanai has Kikuo and Shunsuke go through their dance movements like army cadets running drills, sternly swatting them with a switch if they can’t hold their positions steady. Later, as the camera closes in on their meticulous posing on stage, we understand how they’re making the laborious look effortless.

Kokuho features scenes from several kabuki plays, such as Wisteria Maiden and Two Lions, that unfold at length. (The U.S. release has added annotations in the subtitles briefly explaining the plot of each play to help with context.) It also pays attention to the more mundane elements of this art, spending considerable time showing the backstage workings of the theater and how much work is entailed in the costuming, and especially the application of kumadori. It’s little wonder that the film has sparked a real-world resurgence in kabuki; it encourages active curiosity in the form, rather than use it as a mere backdrop. Kabuki performer Ichikawa Danjuro told Japan Times, “I’ve seen more young people and couples in the audience than usual,” adding that he would incorporate Wisteria Maiden into upcoming performances.

Ryo Yoshizawa as Kikuo in "Kokuho."

©SHUICHI YOSHIDA/ASP ©2025 "KOKUHO" Film Partners

One of the film’s more impressive qualities is the way it invites the viewer to read the subtext of Kikuo and Shunsuke’s lives in their performances without explicitly highlighting anything. A script with less faith in its audience might continually remind them of Kikuo witnessing his father’s death, but Lee trusts us to remember on our own. The plot features two renditions of a scene from the kabuki play Love Suicide. In the first, Kikuo assumes the role of a woman whose resolve is strengthened by her lover’s touch during a soliloquy, and Shinsuke watches from the audience, jealous of his success. In the second, taking place decades later, Shinsuke plays the woman and Kikuo the lover, and when Kikuo touches Shinsuke, he sees the ravages of diabetes on his foot, which causes him to realize his friend has little remaining time on the stage. Their mutual anguish infuses their performances, turning the scene into an intimate tragedy. That dramatization of how the personal informs artistic creation is a major reason Kokuho has resonated so strongly.