<em>The Tale of the Princess Kaguya</em>

Abstract

Children walking through shaded woodlands joyfully singing of spinning waterwheels and of “birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, flowers.” A hollownesting bird returns to a tree with food for its chicks. A snake swims across water. Boar piglets suckling at a sow. A squirrel watches the children walking and singing along a woodland path. They scramble over a stony brook. When the children arrive at a lookout onto a forested valley, their singing is stopped by the melodic, pitchperfect singing voice of a small girl among them. Looking out onto the landscape, her lone rendition of the lyrics of returning to experience nature is much more palpable than what her friends have been repeating in unison. It resonates with a sense of longing she will crushingly succumb to in the future: “Birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, flowers / Teach me how to feel / If I hear that you pine for me / I will return to you.” That biophilic infant, the yettobeprincess Kaguya, will rapidly grow like bamboo, into an adult within a few short months.1 Her mythical transformation— from an innocent child, embodying simplicity and awed wonder at nature, to a young woman dragooned by filial obligation into an urban existence of material goods, insufferable courtships, and isolation from the rural life she experienced every day as a child— is freighted with cosmic irony, given her supernatural origins in a bamboo stalk and the wealth she brings to her foster parents. Moreover, the psychological collapse of Kaguya into resignation and depression from her conflicted sense of self caused by compounded doubt over her identity— fatherly pressure to pursue and attain a better life through prestige and a material lifestyle over the simpler, uncomplicat-