Princess Kaguya and the Five Impossible Tasks: Reading The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Japan's Oldest Monogatari

Nobody knows who wrote The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori Monogatari). It is a Japanese prose tale with roots in folklore, written by an unknown author in the late ninth or early tenth century during the Heian period, and it is considered the oldest surviving work in the monogatari form. What happens in it is easier to say: an old man finds a tiny girl inside a glowing stalk of bamboo, she grows into a woman of extraordinary beauty, she turns away five noble suitors with impossible tasks and then refuses even the Emperor, and at last she reveals that she comes from the Moon and must go home. Because the heroine is Kaguya-hime, the work is also known as The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

An author nobody can name

Scholars have put forward a whole list of candidates. The work has been attributed to the scholar-poet Minamoto no Shitagō, to the Abbot Henjō, to a member of the Inbe clan, to someone from a political faction opposed to Emperor Tenmu, and to the poet Ki no Haseo, who wrote poetry in Chinese. It is even debated whether one person or a group wrote it, and whether the first version was in kanbun (Chinese-style writing), in Japanese kana, or in Chinese itself. None of these theories has won the argument, so the honest answer is still "author unknown".

The date is also uncertain, but there are clues. A poem in the tenth-century Yamato Monogatari refers to the tale in connection with a moon-viewing party held at the palace in 909, and the story's mention of smoke rising from Mount Fuji suggests the volcano was still active when it was written; the Kokin Wakashū indicates that the mountain had stopped smoking by 905. Some sources narrow the date to between 871 and 881. Curiously, the oldest manuscript that survives today is much later, dated to 1592.

What a monogatari is

The word monogatari means a tale, and as a literary form it is an extended prose narrative, closely tied to oral storytelling and almost always fictional or fictionalized. The form flourished from roughly the ninth to the fifteenth century, and later classifications put Taketori Monogatari among the denki-monogatari, stories dealing with fantastical events. That label fits: this is a story with a shining bamboo stalk, a dragon, a fire-proof robe and a delegation from the sky. Yet it is also a sharp, often funny portrait of human vanity, and that mix is part of why it lasted.

The story in brief

One day in a bamboo forest, an old bamboo cutter, Taketori no Okina, notices a stalk that is shining. When he cuts it open he finds a baby the size of his thumb. He and his wife have no children, so they raise her as their daughter and name her Nayotake-no-Kaguya-hime, "Shining Princess of the Young Bamboo". After that, every stalk he cuts holds a small nugget of gold. The family grows rich, and within three months the girl grows into a woman of ordinary size and extraordinary beauty.

Word spreads, and suitors arrive. Five nobles refuse to give up, so Kaguya-hime gives each a task: bring the stone begging bowl of the Buddha, a jeweled branch from the mythical island of Hōrai, a robe made of fire-rat skins, a colored jewel from a dragon's neck, and a cowry shell born from a swallow. Every one of them fails. The first brings a blackened old pot that does not glow with holy light. The second has a branch forged by jewelers, and is exposed when the craftsmen come asking to be paid. The third is cheated by a merchant and his robe burns in the fire test. The fourth gives up after a storm at sea, and the fifth falls while reaching into a swallow's nest.

Then the Emperor himself visits and falls in love. He is not given a task, but she still refuses him, explaining that she is not from his country. For three years they write to each other. One summer she begins to weep whenever she sees the full moon, and finally she tells her parents the truth: she comes from the Moon, was sent to Earth as a punishment for an unnamed crime, and must return. The gold in the bamboo, it turns out, was money from the Moon's people for her keep.

The Emperor sends guards, but when the heavenly beings descend, a strange light leaves the soldiers powerless. Kaguya-hime writes letters to her parents and to the Emperor, leaves her parents her robe, and attaches a little elixir of immortality to the Emperor's letter. When a feather robe is placed on her shoulders, her sadness and her compassion for people on Earth seem to vanish, and she rises to the Capital of the Moon. The grieving Emperor asks which mountain is closest to Heaven, and orders the letter and the elixir burned on its summit, because he does not want to live forever without her.

The people in the tale

Kaguya-hime is not a passive prize. She sets the terms, sees through every trick, and keeps her own counsel until she chooses to speak. Her foster father, the bamboo cutter, is a figure of ordinary love and ordinary greed: the gold makes him rich, and he presses her to marry. The five suitors work almost like a comic chorus. Each tries to buy, fake or bully his way to success rather than earn it, and each is undone in a way that suits his character. The Emperor is the most sympathetic of the men, because he is the only one who accepts her refusal and keeps writing anyway.

The bamboo cutter himself is older than the tale. He appears in the eighth-century poetry collection Man'yōshū, where he meets a group of women and recites a poem to them, which suggests an earlier image or story about a bamboo cutter and mysterious, perhaps heavenly, women.

Themes worth noticing

The most striking theme is attachment. In the tale's logic, Kaguya-hime was sent to Earth, where she would inevitably form material attachment, as her punishment; the moment the feather robe touches her, that attachment is wiped away. Read this way, the story is quietly Buddhist: love for people is what makes earthly life painful, and losing it is both a release and a loss. Many readers find the robe scene the saddest moment of the book, because she forgets the very people she was crying for a page earlier.

A second theme is the gap between appearance and truth. The fake bowl, the forged branch and the burning robe all turn on the question of what is real, and the suitors are punished for putting on a show. A third is mortality. The Emperor's choice to burn the elixir turns a fairy tale into a meditation: immortality without the person you love is not worth having. According to legend, the word fushi (immortality) became the name of the mountain, Fuji, and the smoke from that burning still rises. That is a legend attached to the story, not a historical fact, but it shows how deeply the tale has been woven into the Japanese landscape.

Cousins and lookalikes

Readers sometimes compare Kaguya-hime with the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e, whose legend goes back to the second century BCE and also involves an elixir of immortality and flight to the Moon. The Japanese tale, though, adds many new elements of its own, such as the bamboo cutter, the suitors and the night-time departure with heavenly beings. A Tibetan-style tale published in China in 1957, Banzhu Guniang, once seemed like a possible source, but later research concluded that the 1957 book had copied the Japanese story.

Legacy: from Genji to Ghibli

The tale was already a classic around the year 1000, when The Tale of Genji called it "the ancestor of all tales". It is a staple of Japanese primary education, and many adults can still recite its opening lines. English readers have had it since F. Victor Dickins's translation in 1888, followed by Donald Keene's version in 1956; a complete bilingual translation by Matthew Stavros appeared in 2026.

On screen, the best-known adaptation is Isao Takahata's 2013 Studio Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and Kon Ichikawa directed a live-action version, Princess from the Moon, in 1987. Its echoes reach far beyond faithful retellings, into manga, anime and video games, from Sailor Moon to Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. If you have ever met a mysterious princess who belongs to the Moon in Japanese pop culture, there is a good chance this thousand-year-old tale is somewhere in her family tree.

How to read it today

The tale is short, so it is a gentle first step into classical Japanese literature. A modern translation takes an afternoon. If you are learning Japanese, try the famous opening in a parallel-text edition, then read the five suitors' failures as a set of short comic episodes. Pay attention to how often light appears: the glowing stalk, the shining girl, the light that stops the guards. The whole story moves from the light of the bamboo grove to the light of the Moon.

Learn with Kaguya-hime: Japanese words

Japanese	Meaning	Example
竹取物語 (Taketori Monogatari)	The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter	竹取物語を読んだ。
月 (tsuki)	moon	月を見て泣いた。
光る (hikaru)	to shine, glow	竹が光っていた。
無理な (muri na)	impossible	無理な願いだ。
不死 (fushi)	immortality	不死の薬を燃やした。

Try this: Write three sentences in English about something you would refuse even if it meant living forever, then say 月がきれいですね aloud.