Kaguya-hime Returns to the Moon

She is found inside a bamboo stalk, glowing.

The bamboo cutter Taketori no Okina is out among his grove when he sees one stalk lit from within — a light with no source, a brightness that the bamboo should not be capable of. He cuts it open. Inside, the size of his thumb, is a girl.

She grows quickly. Within three months she is the most beautiful woman in Japan. The bamboo cutter and his wife, who are old and childless, raise her with the devotion of people who have been given a gift they know is temporary. The bamboo grove, after her discovery, yields gold in every stalk the cutter splits. The household becomes prosperous. The beauty of the girl becomes famous.

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Five men of the highest rank in Japan come to propose.

Each is sent away with an impossible task: bring a bowl that belonged to the Buddha from India; bring a jeweled branch from the island of Hōrai; bring the fire-rat’s fur robe from China; bring a jewel from a dragon’s neck; bring a shell that the swallow carries. The tasks are impossible because she has designed them to be. The suitors send false versions and clever forgeries. She identifies each fraud without looking at it carefully, the way someone who actually knows what the real object feels like always recognizes the imitation.

The Emperor himself comes. He does not make demands. He waits. He corresponds with her for years in poetry — the medium of Heian courtship — and she responds, with feeling, in a way that suggests she is not indifferent to him. But when he asks her to come to court she says: I am not of this country. I cannot come.

She is grieving for something. The bamboo cutter and his wife notice it. She watches the moon with an expression that they cannot interpret as longing or as dread because they cannot tell the difference.

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She tells them, when she can no longer avoid telling them: I come from the Moon. I was sent to earth for reasons I was not told. The people of the Moon are coming for me on the fifteenth night of the eighth month.

The bamboo cutter goes to the Emperor. The Emperor sends soldiers — two thousand armed men to guard the house on the night of the fifteenth. They take positions on the roof, at the gates, around the walls.

When the moonlight comes down, the soldiers cannot move. They are not hurt, not killed — just suddenly unable. The light is too heavy or the will is not present or the distinction between ordered and disordered military action does not apply here. The celestial envoys descend in the moonlight, flying.

Kaguya-hime writes a last letter to the Emperor. The envoys bring a celestial robe that, when placed around her shoulders, will take away her memories of the earth. She weeps. She begs for a moment to finish the letter. She writes: Even if you send me to the moon, my thoughts remain with you.

Then the envoy places the robe around her shoulders.

Her face goes quiet.

She rises into the moon.

The bamboo cutter and his wife mourn for the rest of their lives. The Emperor receives her letter and her poem and cannot read them without weeping. He orders his ministers to burn the letter of immortality she sent him on the peak of the mountain nearest heaven — Mt. Fuji. The smoke rises.

The word for immortality in Japanese means not dying. The smoke of its burning is the smoke of a man choosing mortality over a heaven that does not contain the woman who wrote him that poem.