The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
At a Glance
- Central figures: Taketori no Okina, an old bamboo cutter; Kaguya-hime, the luminous girl he finds inside a bamboo stalk and raises as his daughter; the Emperor of Japan, who falls in love with her and is refused.
- Setting: Ancient Japan; a bamboo forest and the imperial court, ending on the moon. The story is among the oldest surviving Japanese narratives.
- The turn: Kaguya-hime reveals to her adoptive parents that she is not of this world - she was sent from the moon as punishment for an unknown transgression and must return when the time comes.
- The outcome: Celestial beings descend and carry Kaguya-hime back to the moon. She leaves her parents a letter and a vial of the Elixir of Immortality; the heartbroken Emperor burns the elixir on the summit of Mount Fuji rather than drink it.
- The legacy: The smoke rising from Mount Fuji is said to be the smoke of that burning, carrying the Emperor’s grief toward the moon where Kaguya-hime now lives.
A bamboo stalk glowed in the forest. The old cutter Taketori no Okina had worked these groves all his life, and he knew the sound of hollow cane, the weight of a fresh-cut pole, the way morning light moved between the stems. This light was different - steady, interior, coming from inside the stalk itself. He knelt and split it open with his blade.
Sitting inside, no larger than his thumb, was a girl. She shone.
He brought her home to his wife. They had no children. They wrapped her in cloth and called her Kaguya-hime - Princess of the Shining Light - and raised her as their own. She did not stay small for long. Within weeks she had grown into a woman of extraordinary beauty, and by the time that growth was finished, word of her had spread across the province, then farther.
The Five Impossible Tasks
Five noble suitors arrived, each convinced that persistence and rank would be enough. Kaguya-hime had no wish to marry any of them, but she would not say so plainly. Instead she gave each man a task. She named treasures that were either impossible to find or did not exist at all.
The first she sent after the stone begging bowl of the Buddha. The second she sent to Mount Horai for a branch of the jeweled tree that grew there - a tree no one had seen and no one could reach. The third she asked for a robe made from the hide of a fire-rat. The fourth for a jewel taken from the neck of a living dragon. The fifth for a cowry shell born from swallows.
Each man tried to deceive her. The first brought back a lacquered bowl that had never been near the Buddha. The second hired craftsmen to counterfeit the jeweled branch in gold and silver. The third purchased a foreign robe he claimed was fire-rat hide. The fourth and fifth fared no better - one abandoned the quest entirely, the other was nearly drowned trying to rob a swallow’s nest. Kaguya-hime saw through every substitution. She refused them all, calmly, without cruelty, and without explanation.
The Emperor’s Letters
Even the Emperor heard of her. He came, or sent word that he wished to come, and Kaguya-hime declined his proposal as she had declined the others - but she did it gently. She told him she was not destined to remain on the earth. The Emperor accepted her refusal and did not force the matter. He sent letters. She replied to them. A correspondence grew up between them that was neither courtship nor ordinary friendship, and it ran for years.
Her parents noticed, during those same years, that she had changed. She grew sad in ways that had nothing to do with the suitors or the Emperor. On full-moon nights she would stand outside and look at the sky for a long time without speaking.
What Kaguya-hime Revealed
They asked her what was wrong. She held off answering for as long as she could. Then, on a night when the moon was full and very bright, she told them.
She was not from this world. She had been sent to Earth - she called it a punishment, though for what offense she did not say, or could not say. Her time here had always been fixed. It was almost over. On the next full moon, celestial beings would descend from the moon to take her home. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
Taketori no Okina went to the court and pleaded for guards - warriors who could stand on the roof and drive off any heavenly procession that came to take his daughter. The court sent men. The old bamboo cutter armed himself and posted everyone he had around the house.
It made no difference.
The Night of the Full Moon
The sky opened. A procession of celestial figures came down in a column of white light, and every guard who saw it found that his arms would not move, his bow would not draw. The warriors stood useless under the clear sky.
Kaguya-hime came outside. She was weeping. She said goodbye to her mother and her father - the people who had found her in the bamboo, who had raised her without knowing what she was, who had loved her without condition - and the words she had for them were not enough, and she knew it.
Before she rose with the procession, she gave them a letter. She gave them a small vial containing the Elixir of Immortality, in case it might ease some of their grief. Then the light surrounded her and she was gone.
She sent one final letter to the Emperor before she left the earth entirely, telling him where she had gone. He received it. He read it. He did not drink the Elixir of Immortality that she had also sent to him - he had no wish to live forever without her. He ordered the vial taken to the highest mountain in Japan and burned there, on the summit of Mount Fuji, so that the smoke would carry upward into the sky she had returned to.
The smoke from that fire, people say, has never fully stopped. It still rises from the peak of Fuji, drifting toward the moon on clear nights, carrying something that could not be delivered any other way.