Kaguya-hime

Summary

Kaguya-hime is the heroine of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the oldest Japanese tale written in the Japanese script, from the late ninth or early tenth century, which the Tale of Genji calls the ancestor of all tales. She is a woman of the moon who lived among people for a short time and then went back.

An old man who cut bamboo in the hills and made it into things for people, Sanuki no Miyatsuko by name, one day saw a bamboo stem whose base was shining. He went up to it and found inside a person three inches tall, very beautiful, and said: I see you every morning and evening in the bamboo I cut, so you must be meant for my child; he carried her home in his palm, and his wife raised her in a basket because she was so small. After that the old man kept finding gold in the joints of the bamboo and grew rich. The girl grew to a woman in three months, and the house filled with her light so that no corner was dark; when the old man was sad he looked at her and his sadness went. He called a priest named Akita, who named her Nayotake no Kaguya-hime, Kaguya-hime of the supple bamboo.

Many men courted her, and five princes and ministers kept coming night and day. She told the old man: whichever of them shows me what I ask has the truest love. She asked the first for the stone begging bowl of the Buddha in India; the second for a branch from a tree on Mount Hōrai in the eastern sea, with roots of silver, a trunk of gold and fruit of white pearls; the third for a robe of the fur of the fire-rat of China, which fire cannot burn; the fourth for the five-coloured jewel in a dragon's neck; and the fifth for the cowrie shell a swallow carries. All failed: the first brought a bowl black with soot from a mountain temple; the second had a false branch made, and the craftsmen came to claim their wages in front of her; the third's robe burned; the fourth nearly drowned; the fifth died of his fall. Then the emperor sought her, and she refused; he came as if out hunting, and when he caught her sleeve she became a shadow. He said: take your own form again and I will go, and she did, and he went, and the two exchanged poems for three years.

Then she began to look at the moon and weep, and as the full moon of the eighth month drew near she told her parents: I am not of this land; I am of the capital of the moon, I came because of a bond from long ago, and on the fifteenth of this month my people will come for me. The emperor sent two thousand soldiers, a thousand on the wall and a thousand on the roof, and her mother held her in a locked room. At midnight everything around the house shone with the light of ten full moons, and people came down from the sky on clouds and stood five feet above the ground; the soldiers' strength left them and they could not shoot. Their king told the old man: Kaguya-hime had committed a fault and was sent down to your lowly house for a time; her fault is ended. The doors opened of themselves. She wrote a letter for her parents and left them her robe. The heavenly people carried a box with the heavenly robe of feathers and a jar of the drug of not dying; she tasted a little of it, wrote to the emperor, "now as I put on the robe of heaven I remember you with longing", and sent him the jar. When they put the robe on her, her grief for the old man left her, for whoever wears it has no care in the heart; she entered the carriage and rose with a hundred heavenly beings.

The old man and his wife wept tears of blood, refused medicine and kept to their bed. The emperor asked which mountain was nearest to heaven, and was told: a mountain in the province of Suruga. He said: what use to me is the drug of not dying if I cannot meet her? He sent a man with many soldiers to carry the letter and the jar to the summit and burn them there. From this the mountain was named Fuji, and its smoke still rises into the clouds. The mountain's name is heard two ways in the tale: 不死 fushi, not dying, and 富士 Fuji, rich in soldiers, and the text names the soldiers outright.

The idea the tale turns on is that human love is a bond the people of heaven do not know. Kaguya-hime turns her suitors away with things not found on earth, then grows attached to the old man, his wife and the emperor, weeps when her people come, and her grief ends only when she puts on the robe of heaven. The emperor holds immortality in his hand and burns it, because endless life without the one he loves is worth nothing to him. Short human life is where love lives in the tale, and heaven is where deathlessness lives without care. The drug of immortality is given here and given back, and becomes smoke on a sacred mountain.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read this heroine. Setting aside hime, princess, kaguya remains. The Nipponica encyclopedia says it means the princess who glitters with light, and that kagu shares its root with the old Japanese verbs for glittering and shimmering. In the Old Japanese lexicon kag- begins the words of light: light and shade, to radiate, to twinkle. In Arabic it is kawkab: Lane says that kawkab is a star, that the kawkab of iron is its glistening, that dewdrops falling on the herbage at night and becoming like stars are kawkab, and that a youth whose face has become beautiful is called "a full kawkab". The k is k, the second k becomes g as the k, q and j sounds interchange in the Juthoor tables, and the w lies in the vowel u. She is a girl by whom the house is lit, who comes down from the moon and returns to it.

Linguistic Root

The great Japanese dictionary says the name occurs before the tale in the Kojiki, as that of one of Emperor Suinin's consorts, written in sound-signs 迦具夜 kaguya with a voiced g, and that some read it kakuya with k, though the Kojiki's old spelling has the g. The Nipponica encyclopedia says that if kagu shares its root with the verbs for glittering and shimmering, the g is right, and that radiant beauty was the ideal of beauty in early Japan. Medieval writers wrote the name with two Chinese graphs meaning radiance and brilliance.

The Arabic reading kawkab takes the first two letters of the Japanese base kag-: k is k, and the second k is g because the two sounds come from one place in the mouth and interchange in the Juthoor tables; the w lies in the vowel u after the g. All Lane's senses of kawkab are brightness: the star, the glistening of iron, the dew at night, the handsome youth's face. Lane says the word's origin is disputed, some deriving it from w-k-b, others from k-w-b, and suspects the Arabs took it from Hebrew kokhav; in the project's framework the Hebrew is a sister witness of the same word.

Old Japanese has the verb kagaywop-, to twinkle and glitter, which holds all four letters, k, g, w and the p that answers b, though with g and w in the other order.

The limit of the reading is that the b of kawkab does not show in the name Kaguya, and that the ya at its end is not yet explained.

Key Mythic Narratives

The heavenly daughter of an old couple

Another eighth-century fragment of the Tango Fudoki tells a near story: an old man and his wife took the robe of a heavenly maiden so that she could not go back, and she became their adopted daughter; she brewed a fine liquor which they sold and grew rich, and the whole story explains the goddess Toyoukanome of the Nagu shrine. In both tales an old couple grow rich through a daughter from heaven who is not theirs.

Kaguya-hime on Mount Fuji

The Heibonsha encyclopedia says that the medieval books of the origins of the Mount Fuji cult report, on the word of old men, that Kaguya-hime entered a cave on the mountain and never came out, and she was made the goddess of the mountain itself. The same encyclopedia mentions a Tibetan tale of a girl born from bamboo who sets her suitors tasks that cannot be done, very like the tale of Kaguya-hime.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In China, Chang'e stole the drug of not dying that her husband had brought from the Queen Mother of the West, drank it and rose to the moon, and her oldest story is written on bamboo slips. Kaguya-hime comes down from the moon and is born from bamboo, then gives the emperor the drug of not dying as she returns to the moon, and he burns it. The Chinese woman takes immortality and leaves her husband; the Japanese woman leaves immortality to the man, and he refuses it.

In the Lay of Völundr, Völundr and his brothers found three women on a lakeshore with swan-feather cloaks beside them and married them; the women stayed seven winters, then flew off and did not come back. Kaguya-hime's return is completed only by the robe of feathers, and whoever wears it forgets the people of earth. In both stories the feather robe is what takes the woman back to her own world.

In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, Urvaśī, one of the women of water and sky, lives with King Purūravas under conditions, until her companions from the sky steal two lambs from her couch and the condition breaks; she goes back to them, and he later sees her swimming with her sisters in the shape of birds. Kaguya-hime too is a woman of the sky who lives a while among people, until her own people come and take her and no one can stop them.