The Bamboo Cutter's Impossible Tasks

She gives them each one thing to find.

She has thought carefully about the objects. Each is real enough to be imaginable, impossible enough that it cannot be genuinely found. The Buddha’s stone begging bowl. A jeweled branch from the mountain of Hōrai. The fire-rat’s fur robe from China. A jewel from a dragon’s neck. The shell that the swallow carries before birth. Each task tells something about the man it is given to, because a man’s response to an impossible request reveals the shape of his character.

---

Prince Ishitsukuri is given the Buddha’s begging bowl. He leaves Japan in the direction of India and returns three years later with a confident expression and a bowl he purchased in a shop in Naniwa, wrapped in brocade, accompanied by a made-up story about its provenance. He leaves it at the gate with a poem suggesting his suffering.

Kaguya-hime picks up the bowl. She looks at it.

She gives it back.

The Taketori Monogatari notes, with the understated comedy that runs through the whole narrative, that the bowl Ishitsukuri carried did not glow. The real bowl of the Buddha would glow. This bowl did not glow. The prince had not been to India. He had been to Naniwa.

He takes his bowl and goes home.

---

Prince Kuramochi is given the jeweled branch from Hōrai. He is clever and wealthy and organized. He publicly announces a sea voyage. He secretly stays in Japan and hires the best craftsmen in the country to produce a jeweled branch — a branch of silver with golden leaves and jade fruit. After three years he has it. He goes back to sea for a few days for verisimilitude and returns to the bamboo cutter’s house, limping and salt-weathered, with a story of storms and near-death and the divine island.

He presents the branch. It is beautiful. The bamboo cutter and his wife are moved. Even Kaguya-hime hesitates.

Then the craftsmen arrive. They have not been paid.

The men who made the branch stand in the road asking for their money and explaining, loudly, what they were hired to do and when and where. The branch is exquisite. The lie is complete.

Kuramochi takes his branch and goes home faster than he arrived.

---

The Minister Abe no Miushi is given the fire-rat’s fur robe from China. He writes to China and orders it through merchant contacts and pays an extraordinary price for a robe that his Chinese correspondent swears is the genuine article. When he puts it in fire to test it — fire cannot burn the fire-rat’s robe — it burns immediately and completely.

He watches it burn with the expression of a man who paid a great deal of money to watch something burn.

The other two suitors, given the remaining impossible tasks, produce versions of the same results: one nearly drowns and then gives up; one does not try at all and simply sends a poem expressing despair. The poem is fine, actually. The poem is not the task.

---

Kaguya-hime examines each failure with no cruelty and no triumph. She is not glad they failed. She is not redesigning the tasks to make them harder. She is not playing with their suffering.

She is demonstrating — to them, to herself, to the bamboo cutter and his wife, to everyone who will read this story — that the tasks are not actually about the objects. The objects are metaphors for what no human man can give her: something that comes from beyond the world.

The five suitors are not inadequate men. They are adequate men confronted with an impossible situation, and their inadequacy is the adequacy of all earthly things when measured against what they cannot contain.

She watches them leave, each with his failed object, and returns to looking at the moon.