Why a 25-Year-Old Tech Engineer Watches Kabuki Every Month

In a darkened theater in Asakusa, Tokyo, this January, I watched a man who stutters fall in love.

His name was Matahei, a struggling artist in 17th-century Japan. Every time he tried to speak, the words caught in his throat, his body tensing with the effort. Beside him stood his wife Otoku, who would gently finish his sentences, her voice calm and certain, her love unwavering. This was “傾城反魂香 土佐将監閑居の場” (Keisei Hangonkō), a Kabuki play centuries old, and I was crying.

I’m a software engineer. I’m 25. I started my first job this past October: attending meetings, going through onboarding and training, learning systems, writing some code when I can. Living in a world of Slack notifications, documentation, and screens. Six months ago, I would have laughed if you told me I’d be spending my weekends at traditional Japanese theater, moved to tears by classical performances I could barely understand.

But here I am. Every month since October, without fail.

It all started with a film.

The Crack in the Screen

October 2025. My first day as a new graduate engineer.

The work was exhilarating. Learning new systems, sitting in meetings, absorbing how a real company operates. There was onboarding, training sessions, documentation to read, occasional coding when I could contribute. I loved it. I had energy, ambition, and the whole world of tech ahead of me.

But within weeks, I noticed something. My entire life had become screens. Phone, laptop, Teams meetings, and Confluence pages. Even my hobbies (visiting cafes, art museums, watching films) still kept me tethered to the digital through Instagram, photography apps, streaming services.

I wasn’t burned out. I was energized. But I could feel myself becoming one-dimensional. Tech, IT, management frameworks, sprint planning, project timelines. It was all fast-paced, all about efficiency, all about the next deliverable. I was growing as a professional, but what about everything else? What about beauty? Creativity? The parts of being human that have nothing to do with productivity?

I needed something to balance the equation. Something slow. Something analog. Something centuries-old.

Then I watched “Kokuho” (2025).

The film wasn’t just about Kabuki. It was about the people who dedicate their entire lives to preserving an art form that the modern world has mostly forgotten. There was a scene featuring “二人道成寺” (Futari Dōjōji), where two dancers in white robes perform the classical Dōjōji piece together. The precision, the grace, the weight of centuries in every gesture cracked something open in me.

I remembered being eight years old, learning koto and shamisen as part of my elementary school curriculum. For four years, I plucked those strings without really understanding what I was touching. After that, traditional Japanese culture became wallpaper, always there, never noticed.

“Kokuho” made me notice again. More than that, it made me hungry. I needed to see this in person, to sit in a physical space and watch human bodies perform art that had nothing to do with optimization, disruption, or the next quarterly release.

So in October 2025, at 24 years old, I bought my first ticket to Kabuki-za.

October: Drowning in Beauty

I went alone. I didn’t know anyone else who’d want to come, and honestly, I was too embarrassed to ask. A tech bro at Kabuki felt ridiculous even to me.

Kabuki-za stopped me in my tracks. Ornate in a way modern buildings have forgotten, all curved roofs and lanterns and gold. I bought a pamphlet because I had no idea what I was about to watch: “錦秋十月大歌舞伎 第3部,” featuring acts from “義経千本桜” (Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura).

The lights dimmed. The curtain opened with a distinctive wooden clacking (tatatatata) and suddenly I was underwater.

I understood maybe 30% of the classical Japanese. The plot was dense, full of historical references I didn’t have. But the precision of every movement: a hand raised just so, a kimono sleeve timed perfectly to the shamisen’s note. It was like watching carefully architected code execute flawlessly. Except this wasn’t code. This was human craft, honed over lifetimes.

On the train home, I pulled up YouTube and searched for other actors performing the same scenes. Different performers, same story, like reading different developers’ implementations of the same algorithm. The logic identical, but the style and tiny choices all different.

The Thing About Balance

Here’s what I started to realize: I loved my work, but the industry itself moved at a relentless pace.

The IT industry, especially mission-critical projects, doesn’t slow down. Releases, updates, patches, sprints. The cycle is constant. Even when I wasn’t personally rushing, I was surrounded by this velocity, absorbing its rhythm, learning to think in terms of efficiency and optimization.

But Kabuki offered something entirely different. You cannot speed up a Kabuki performance. You cannot skip to the good parts. The pauses are as important as the action. The silence is as meaningful as the music. It demands your presence, your patience, your full attention.

I wasn’t escaping tech. I was complementing it. My weekdays could be spent learning the fast-paced world of IT and mission-critical systems. But I needed weekends for the other parts of being human: beauty, tradition, creativity, the slow accumulation of understanding that has nothing to do with quarterly goals.

I was trying to balance the equation intentionally, proactively, before I became only one thing.

December: With My Grandmother

For my second performance in December, my family came with me: my mom, dad, and my grandmother, who has loved Kabuki for decades.

We watched “十二月大歌舞伎 第3部” at Kabuki-za, which included “与話情浮名横櫛 源氏店” and “火の鳥” (Hi no Tori). During intermission, my grandmother leaned over and pointed out details I’d completely missed: the way an actor’s eyes had darted left to signal deception, the significance of a particular hand gesture, the politics embedded in costume colors.

Watching Kabuki with her, I realized I was connecting not just to an art form, but to her, to my family’s past, to a continuity I’d been ignoring while chasing the future.

She seemed happy I was interested. I was happy to be learning from her.

January: The Stuttering Artist

I turned 25 on January. A few weeks later, I went alone to Asakusa Public Hall for “新春浅草歌舞伎 第二部” (New Year Asakusa Kabuki, Part 2).

The first piece was “傾城反魂香 土佐将監閑居の場” (Keisei Hangonkō, Tosa Shōgen Kankyo no Ba), the story of Matahei and Otoku, the stuttering artist and his devoted wife.

I sat there, three months into my Kabuki education, and watched this centuries-old play center a story about disability and unconditional love. I’d assumed (stupidly, I realize now) that classical art would be rigid, conservative, unable to speak to contemporary concerns about inclusion and support and seeing people’s full humanity.

But here it was. A man struggling to speak, supported by a woman who loved him not despite his stutter but as he was, completely. Their partnership, their tenderness, their mutual respect — it was timeless.

When the scene ended, I realized my face was wet.

Then came “男女道成寺” (Meoto Dōjōji), a variation of the Dōjōji tradition where two male actors perform together, one as a male character and one as a female character (onnagata, the Kabuki tradition of men portraying women). This was different from the “二人道成寺” (two female characters) featured in “Kokuho,” but it was part of the same family of “道成寺もの” (Dōjōji-mono) performances, each a unique interpretation of the same legendary story.

The interplay between masculine and feminine energies, both embodied by male performers, the humor woven through the elegance, the control required to make such difficult movements look effortless. After three months of watching, learning, building my Kabuki vocabulary, I could finally see it. Not just watch it, but see it.

I bought my pamphlet, as always. Took my seat, as always. And lost myself completely.

The Ritual, Refined

My Kabuki practice has settled into a rhythm now:

I buy the pamphlet at the theater to map out the characters and storyline beforehand. I read it during the train ride, trying to anchor myself before the performance sweeps me away.

After each show, I come home and search YouTube for archived performances of the same play by different actors across different eras. It’s become my favorite part: seeing how the same scene can be tender or fierce, comic or tragic, depending on who’s performing it.

I post about each visit on Instagram Stories with a short comment about what moved me. It’s not common for someone my age to attend Kabuki regularly, so it becomes a conversation starter with friends and colleagues. One friend even went to see a show recently. I don’t know if I influenced that decision, but I hope I did.

Why Monthly?

People ask why I commit to going every month instead of occasionally when something looks interesting.

The answer is: because understanding takes time.

One performance taught me to notice. The second taught me to anticipate. By the third, I started to understand the grammar: how certain gestures meant certain emotions, how musical cues signaled transitions, how costume changes revealed character development.

Kabuki rewards sustained attention. It’s not a medium you can master in a weekend binge or a crash course. It unfolds slowly, demanding repetition, presence, and patience.

Each month, I understand a little more. Each performance, I catch subtleties I previously missed. It’s iterative learning — version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 of my Kabuki literacy.

And honestly? In a life spent optimizing, automating, and accelerating everything, there’s something deeply satisfying about engaging with an art form that refuses to be rushed.

The Space Between

Every month, I’ll keep going. I’ll keep buying pamphlets, keep watching YouTube archives, keep posting on Instagram, keep learning.

Because somewhere in the space between the ancient and the modern, between the analog and the digital, between the kimono and the keyboard — that’s where I’ve found something real.

At 25, working in an industry that worships youth and novelty and disruption, discovering that wisdom lives in the old and the slow and the preserved might be the most revolutionary thing I’ve learned this year.

The tech world will keep moving at light speed. Kabuki will keep moving at its own pace, unchanged for centuries. And once a month, I’ll step out of one world and into the other, finding balance in the crossing.