The Bamboo Cutter: a story beyond the bamboo

A bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl in bamboo and raises her with his wife. Kaguya-hime grows rapidly and attracts suitors. Five nobles undertake different demands but fail. The emperor also seeks contact, and letters connect them. The ending does not reward a successful courtship: on the fifteenth night of the eighth month, visitors from the moon take her away.

Kaguya-hime asks the five suitors for the Buddha’s stone bowl, a jewelled branch from Hōrai, the fire-rat’s robe, a jewel from a dragon’s neck and a shell sought from a swallow. The demands test their claims to status, wealth and extraordinary treasures, creating opportunities for satire and humour. Each fails to meet her demand. Prince Kuramochi’s branch makes one failure concrete. He pretends to travel far away but hires craftsmen to make a jewelled branch. Their arrival to demand payment exposes the object’s fabricated origin and his false account.

When the moon’s visitors put the feather robe on Kaguya-hime, her sorrow for the old man and her troubled human feelings fade. Before this, she leaves the emperor a letter and an elixir of immortality. Without the prospect of seeing her, he does not want endless life and orders them burned on the highest mountain. The narrative connects this event with Mount Fuji’s name; it is an explanation within the story, not evidence for the mountain’s actual name or formation.

Scholars place the work in the Heian period, while its precise composition and authorship remain unresolved. The Tale of Genji’s picture-contest chapter refers to the bamboo cutter’s story as an ancestor of monogatari, or prose tales, showing how an early reader positioned it within the narrative tradition.

Copies and commentary

The surviving books are much later than the tale’s composition. Kokugakuin University provisionally dates its manuscript to early Edo, noting the absence of a colophon and four omissions; its account also discusses a 1570 copy attributed to Jōha and a 1592 Mutō copy. Edo printing and commentary opened further ways to read the work. Kyoto University’s 1784 Taketori Monogatari-shō combines the narrative, commentary and notes above the text. Later children’s versions and screen adaptations make further selections and changes.

Pictures and film adaptation

Images have their own transmission history. The Tale of Genji already mentions pictures of the Bamboo Cutter, yet surviving examples are mainly from the Edo period onward. Rikkyo University’s early-to-mid-Edo scroll includes the complete narrative between its pictures; its pasted-picture screen appears to reuse illustrations from an illustrated manuscript. Manuscripts, printed books, scrolls and screens thus offered different ways to read and view the story. A modern film adaptation is Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, released in 2013.