Final Rating: 4.5/5
In Japanese Kabuki theatre, women are traditionally forbidden from performing. In their place are “onnagata,” men who specialize in playing female roles. Kokuho, from director Lee Sang-il, explores the world of onnagata by way of a rivalry between two talented onnagata, Kikuo (Ryô Yoshizawa) and Shunsuke (Ryûsei Yokohama). In a sprawling epic spanning 50 years, Kokuho celebrates and interrogates the relationships between tradition and art, authenticity and artifice, and masculinity in the world of kabuki.
Kokuho begins in 1964 in Yokohama. At a party put on by a yakuza boss, renowned onnagata Hanai Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) witnesses a play in which the boss’s son, Kikuo, plays the female role. Though the boss is slightly embarrassed that his son is dressing up as a woman and doing theatre, Hanjiro is immediately taken with the boy’s talent. A year later, Hanjiro accepts Kikuo into his family as an apprentice, giving him the name Hanai Toichiro – “The best man in the East.”
Training alongside Kikuo is Shunsuke, Hanjiro’s son and heir-apparent to his name, but whose talent and passion for the artform barely compare to Kikuo’s. From their first meeting, the rivalry between Shunsuke and Kikuo is in full force. Shunsuke is immediately jealous of Kikuo’s stagename, comparing it to his own, Hanai Hanya – “half a man.”
The characters’ stage names at first seem like an afterthought, something thrown out by Hanjiro on a whim. And yet, each character is saddled with it for the rest of their lives, for better and worse. For Shunsuke, his lineage protects him within the insular world of Kabuki, but “half a man” immediately frames him as the lesser performer to his partner, “the best man in the East.” For Kikuo, his stage name makes a great first impression but remains a constant reminder that anything less than a virtuosic performance may as well be the end of his career.
Kokuho is full of incredible performances. Watanabe disappears into his role as Hanjiro, a stern and distant father whose relationship to his children borders on abuse, but whose passion for his art fuels his every move. Min Tanaka shines in a smaller role as Mangiku, the greatest living onnagata and a living national treasure. Mangiku is more conservative than Hanjiro, often recoiling or openly pushing back against Hanjiro’s attempts to push the boundaries of kabuki. The conflict between the two, while understated, highlights the impenetrability of the wider kabuki world, how difficult it is to buck traditions, even within an institution that began as radical populist art.
The highlights are the leads. Yoshizawa and Yokohama turn in star-making performances as Kikuo and Shunsuke. On-stage and off, the two have brilliant chemistry, their relationship forming the cornerstone of the film. As performers, they are completely in sync, sharing successes and mistakes as each lifts the other’s performance. Offstage, they complement each other just as well, Kikuo’s slavish devotion to his craft keeping Shunsuke in line, while Shunsuke’s embrace of a celebrity lifestyle stops Kikuo from becoming a hermit. As the two train, fight, and navigate the political and artistic world of kabuki, it feels like watching two entire lives laid bare. Two lives intricately and unbreakably bonded, Kikuo and Shunsuke feeling even closer than brothers.
Kokuho is rife with time-skips, plenty of which are immediately followed by characters unsubtly recapping whatever was just skipped. After a major performance ends with Shunsuke running off, the next scene starts with Hanai stating “no one has seen Shunsuke for 8 years.”
The characters themselves embody archetypal roles. Shunsuke is an artist living in the shadow of his father. His father is a stern, unreachably cold man hiding a heart of gold. Kikuo is a man so driven by his desire to be the best that he’s willing to do anything (a chilling scene even shows Kikuo praying at a shrine before telling his daughter he’s just made a deal with the devil).
But while Kokuho is at times overly melodramatic, it never feels as if it’s relying on cliches. In fact, the structural familiarity of the story feels in tune with the leads’ journey through the world of Kabuki. The plays they perform are all centuries old, but the beauty of Kokuho comes from the performers tapping into a deeper well of emotion to bring those characters to life in new ways.
The film’s treatment of femininity is its strongest aspect. Kikuo and Shunsuke spend their lives trying to become young women, but their mentors and confidants are other men doing the same thing. Any time “a young woman would never do that” or “imagine what a young woman would feel at this moment” is said, it’s by an older man projecting his idea of what a woman should be. Meanwhile, the actual women in their lives largely exist outside the theatre ecosystem.
The female cast of the film is excellent, with Shinobu Terajima and Mistuki Takahata standing out as Shunsuke’s mother and wife, respectively. The female characters work “normal” jobs and talk about supporting their partners’ passions, keep them focused on relationships and livelihoods outside of the theatre, and generally are more realistic in their ambitions. In a film about obsession with greatness, the female characters have been excluded from the start. But at the same time, since the greatness in question is authenticity as a young woman, they’ve already achieved it.
Every character in the film is at their most expressive, their most emotionally authentic, when they are a woman. Only when they break past the oppressive, patriarchal institution they perpetuate can they truly be free.
Kokuho presents the world of kabuki as one suffocated by strict adherence to tradition and toxic masculinity. One in which the most talented careers may be cut short for reasons as arbitrary as lineage or gender. At the same time, Kokuho celebrates the art of kabuki as something capable of producing transcendent, awe-inspiring beauty. Whose practitioners can become such incredible storytellers that the only way to describe them is as “kokuho”, or “living national treasures.”
Kokuho was seen during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
