Lunch with Danjuro Ichikawa XII is a little like having a bite to eat with the ghost of William Shakespeare. Danjuro XII, a kabuki actor from Japanese theatre’s most prestigious family, is twelfth in an unbroken line of Danjuro Ichikawas stretching back to Danjuro I, whose acting career ended abruptly in 1704 when somebody stabbed him to death on stage.

The first Danjuro, a playwright and the most celebrated thespian of his age, invented a rough, macho style of acting called aragoto (literally “wild thing”), which has passed down from father to son and survives today in the body and fearsome stare of Danjuro XII.

Donald Richie, a scholar of Japanese culture, describes this method of pickling artistic tradition in human flesh as the “petrified arts”. One of the most extraordinary things about kabuki – a thrilling, spectacular and moving form of theatre that rivals any in the world – is that it is a family monopoly, performed almost exclusively by acting clans that are hundreds of years old. Kabuki actors are like British royals, only they have to perform on stage – rather than open supermarkets – to justify their elevated existence.

Generations of Danjuros have begun as Shinnosukes or Ebizos, before inheriting the Danjuro name when they are deemed worthy. The present Danjuro received his name in 1985, at the relatively young age of 38, in a ceremony called a shumei, performed on stage.

A blend of ka (song), bu (dance) and ki (acting), kabuki is like nothing on earth. In the gruff aragoto style, faces are painted in bright colours, and larger-than-life characters wear flowing demon wigs or silk trousers with yards of trailing hem. Voices are rough, or sing-song, or – in the case of women characters, all played by men – squeakily high-pitched. Music is plucked out on a three-stringed shamisen, an instrument whose taut surface is made of cat skin, the nipples clearly showing in finer models.

Kabuki stories are big and bold. There are tales of daimyo lords and vengeful, masterless samurai, of wrenching dilemmas, and of private love versus public duty. But kabuki is also rebellious and populist, full of boatmen, gravediggers, brothel-keepers and prostitutes straining against the social mores and indulging in smutty innuendo and outrageous swordfights.

A few days before our encounter, one of his assistants calls to say that, instead of meeting at a French restaurant as planned, Danjuro would prefer I came to his office. He will offer me tea and Japanese cakes.

Arriving one sweltering midday, I am ushered into a house by two stiff-backed attendants. After removing my shoes, I am shown into a smallish tatami room with a low table around which are placed flat, green cushions. On one side is a long, folded screen depicting scenes from the most important play in the Ichikawa family tradition – Kanjincho, the tale of a 12th-century noble who escapes death thanks to the quick wit of his retainer.

Danjuro, whom I have seen on stage as lord, priest and comic medicine peddler, sweeps in. Dressed in cream shirt and slacks, he is very much the actor, with a capital A. Booming, musical voice. Penetrating eyes. He reminds me of a monk with his bald, shiny head. Tall and solid, with an electrifying smile, his stare is considered so formidable that theatregoers catching his eye are said to be free from colds for a year.

“I’m sorry there will be no lunch,” he thunders. “And no chairs,” he adds, looking apologetically at the wafer-thin cushions. “Will you be alright?”

One of his assistants shuffles in with wheat tea, ice clinking in the glass, and a red lacquer plate on which sits a small basket. She joins the other assistant, sitting behind me on the tatami in seiza style, feet tucked under the buttocks. In the basket is soft bean cake wrapped in exquisite purple paper, and a little wooden stick, for cutting the sticky substance.

I ask how much is known about Danjuro I, who was born in 1660. “We know quite a bit about the first Danjuro because there are historical records about when he first appeared on stage and prints and pictures related to many things he did,” says Danjuro I’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, pouring out his words like rich wine. “But it’s not so clear where he came from, or what his family background was before he went on stage.”

Around 1600, when kabuki began in Kyoto, it was played by women, but by Danjuro I’s time authorities had clamped down on what they considered lewd performances and transformed kabuki into an all-male affair. “Danjuro I created the aragato acting style. That was just about 80 years after the battle of Sekigahara,” he says, referring to the decisive moment when Ieyasu Tokugawa became sole leader of Japan and moved his power base to Edo, modern-day Tokyo.

“Edo was a city of samurai, but it also became a city of commoners with merchants and craftsmen. Danjuro was really the first person to capture the spirit of the people who lived in Edo and make a theatre for them. Edo audiences like to have a hero who helps the weak and punishes the strong evil-doers,” he says, gesturing lavishly while speaking but falling into almost religious repose when the conversation reverts to me.

We both slurp cold tea and I ask if I can take off my jacket since I am pouring with sweat. I have read that some of the Danjuros, including his father, were adopted from other families. Doesn’t that rather water down the whole concept of single line?

“Family is not just immediate family with parents and children. It’s like a company. The house of the Tokugawa shogun was also organised that way. In order to protect the main family there were branch families so, if there was no heir, they had somewhere to go for a successor.”

After the war, US occupation forces lopped off the imperial family’s branches, I say, ruling that only the immediate relatives of the late Emperor Hirohito be treated as royalty. That led to a succession crisis because Naruhito, the current crown prince, has no male heir. Until his younger brother, Prince Akishino, fathered a boy last year, some conservatives had advocated restoring the branch families, or even re-establishing the concubinage system.

“It used to be more or less openly recognised that, in addition to one’s wife, one would have a mistress with a fairly official position. Children born to someone other than one’s wife could be raised by an associated tea-house and then brought into the theatre, and maybe adopted into the family later as a successor.”

One of the things that strikes me, I say, is the contrast between the humble origins of kabuki and the almost aristocratic position its actors enjoy. In 1887, I’d learnt, Danjuro IX broke convention by performing Kanjincho, a play adapted from the more high-brow Noh theatre, for the Meiji Emperor.

“Today, kabuki actors have a firm place in society. But in the Edo period, they were considered little more than riverbed beggars. So when Kanjincho was presented to the Meiji Emperor, it was partly to make kabuki a respectable art form.”

We talk briefly about Danjuros X (a banker-turned-actor who was given the name posthumously) and XI. I apologise for lingering on so many Danjuros – save the one sat before me. Wasn’t it frightening, I ask, growing up with the ghosts of all those Danjuros pressing on his shoulders?

“I did feel trapped by it – until I took the name myself,” he replies. “A little bit after that, I was freed from the burden. Then, it became not so much a matter of tradition, and more a matter of maximising my own potential.”

He makes a barely discernible gesture and one of the assistants leaps to her feet, slides open the paper shoji screen before returning with some hot green tea. This time there are summer bean cakes, called mizu yokan, made with a lighter jelly. My cup is decorated with pine trees and a golden wave. His, a blue and red one, is styled after a cup used in a love suicide pact in the modern play Toribeyama Shinju.

I want to know about his acting style. I once saw him play an illustrious priest who slowly realises that a beggar woman visiting his temple is, in fact, the mother who abandoned him as a baby. The scene was filled with tension and poignancy but was in no way an attempt at naturalism.

“There are two ways in performing kabuki. When you express sadness,” he says, hissing the Japanese word, kanashii, like a cat, “you can show sadness by crying out loud. But sometimes the performer only briefly shows a sad face. In this case, within the elision lies the truth. Another important characteristic of kabuki is the ma, the pauses. When the performer is surprised by something, he doesn’t react immediately, but pauses and then makes a surprised reaction,” he says, turning his face into a mask and then flashing astonishment. “It is during this pause that the performer pours the feeling into the play.”

Early this year, Danjuro, who only last year recovered from leukaemia, poured out his emotions at Paris’s Palais Garnier. There, alongside his son, Ebizo XI, he performed Kanjincho and Momijigari, a spectacular play in which a ravishing maiden turns into a raving demon.

The French producers were not keen on him doing Kanjincho, a difficult piece that hinges on the main character pretending to be a priest by reading out a subscription list from what is, in fact, a blank scroll. But Danjuro insisted. “As a member of the Ichikawa family there is no way we could have not done Kanjincho,” he says. “It was important to perform what is Japan’s most beloved kabuki play.”

Before I go, I ask him to explain the significance of the shrine tablets set in the wall. “In a family house, there’s often an altar with funeral tablets in memory of family members,” he says. “The unusual thing about this one is that, until the Meiji Restoration, you had Buddhism, and then you had Shinto. Danjuro I to Danjuro VIII are memorialised in Buddhist altars, but from Danjuro IX to my father, they are Shinto.” He gives the tablets a reverential look. “Before I go out I always pay my respects to my ancestors,” he says. “Everything that I have I owe to them.”

David Pilling is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief

Danjuro Ichikawa’s office, Daikanyama, Tokyo

Soft bean cakes
Summer bean cakes
Wheat tea
Green tea