Houraisan Monogatari
I underestimated how disruptive the home renovations I'm overseeing were going to be and spent most of last week reading outside instead of in front of a screen (good!). Today I finished the book. Onward to the next movie.
08.06 — The Tale of Princess Kaguya
"This too shall pass."
- Famous last words
Along with "natsukashii", the Japanese language contains a few unique concepts that no other culture has ever considered: here we will be concerned with the untranslatable "mono no aware (物の哀れ). It implies a sensitivity to the transience of things in the world, whether it be the shelf life of objects, the fragility of interpersonal connections, the impermanence of youth.
Only the most myopic of weeaboos would hear this term (ditto "natsukashii") and think it's truly unique to Japan, so globally prevalent are the themes that it incorporates: "memento mori" has made its way from Plato to bumper stickers. The Persians and Ottomans had "this too shall pass". Gilgamesh, Hamlet, Shelley's Ozymandias—the understanding and confronting of death is the oldest theme in world literature. With good reason, one might argue.
Ghibli's The Tale of Princess Kaguya clocks in at an impressive two hours and twenty minutes, quite a marathon for an anifilm. It took ages for me to give it the attention it deserves, and even then I had to watch it alone (on a laptop screen, on a backless bench, sitting at the counter in front of a coffee rig that it's far too late to put to use). If you aren't familiar with the myth and you trust me to clear things up for you:
The childless couple from Gogol's Old World Landowners have been transplanted to Japan in a time before the fall of the Kingdom of Zeal. One day while the husband is out harvesting bamboo he finds a palm-sized girl sprouting from a bamboo shoot. He brings his tiny charge back to his wife, where the sproutling morphs into a naked newborn. The couple rejoice at the Gods' gift.
Same story, another culture. The "Gods" are once again out to "bless" a pious and barren couple, like Philemon and Baucis before them (or closer, Abraham and Sarah). In this case, "blessing" comes in scare quotes—their reward at the end of this scenario is hardly given in benevolence. The elderly couple begin to raise "Hime-sama" (as Kaguya is called until her coming of age ceremony) as their own.
True to the original tale, the infant Kaguya grows up fast. She makes a group of friends out in the mountain and quickly catches up (and surpasses them) in physical age. You might catch yourself wondering, how is the movie going to last two and a half hours if she's aging at this rate? But fear not. Kaguya grows rapidly, all at once, then stops once she reaches her full young adult bloom. Just like a bamboo shoot.
Her country bumpkin period ends after a few close shaves with wildlife and one gross misdemeanor. Her father finds a bamboo shoot full of gold, and another that spits some fine kimono fabric at him. He wisely takes these as signs to bring Kaguya to the capital. This is later played as controlling and thoughtless, but um, bamboo shoots were spitting fucking gold and kimono at him. Let's not forget that the old man is a country bumpkin himself, doing what he thinks is best for a child he never expected and had very little time to prepare for. If this wasn't the right conclusion, maybe heaven should have sent him a sticky note with a little memo on it. But he probably can't read anyway.
There's a valid theme injected into the movie about expectations and aging, but it's mixed up with the undeniably stupid [alleged] practices of Japan circa 12000 B.C. and this confuses the effect. In this rendition of the myth, Kaguya is depicted as being in accord with animals and nature, all of which is denied to her once she moves to the capital. I get it. She had some relative freedom back in the mountain and is looking back at it wistfully.
Unfortunately the movie pulls a typical Ghibli fait accompli and condemns SOCIETY [joker_face.jpg] and favors nature without properly acknowledging reality: life in the mountains is rough. Her friend and beau, Sutemaru, leads a nomadic crew and frequently steals to stay alive. Reality is sharper than that penned in Ghibli studios (or wherever the hell director Takahata worked). Trading stable shelter from the elements and consistent food for frequent hunger is not a casual bargain. Presumably all of this theme is original to this adaptation, and I'm not convinced it succeeds without superficiality.
A lot of what the movie plays as "control" is just growing up. Most people stop running around naked in the countryside and curling up with javelinas for fun. Growing up is a burden of life anywhere, not an artifact of living in a fascist (or sexist) nation. At some point, Sutemaru's cohort was going to ask Kaguya to milk a cow and carry a basket and a baby a few dozen miles a day. Kaguya's countryside memories are like our own highschool memories—no timeline, no expectations. Reality does not accommodate this into adulthood without severe consequences.
In short, the film does not distinguish between nostalgia (I'm sorry, "natsukashii") for carefree youth and resentment of society for imposing that loss of "innocence". Here this shoddy thinking is masked by more egregious complaints about the story's mythic Heian setting. After Kaguya's crashout (in a dream that was obviously a dream the moment it began) she's off to get her teeth blea... um, BLACKENED (eww eww ewww) and her eyebrows plucked.
The burden of increasing expectations is a regular frustration of growing up. Having your teeth dyed chain smoker black because you got your period is a side effect of living in a stupid culture. The movie conflates them both into the same George Costanza philosophy and both themes suffer for it.
Back to the narrative. Sutemaru gets his ass kicked in the streets of the capital while Kaguya watches from the comfort of her goshoguruma and we see how wide the gulf has become between them. The princess is now shielded from the rough life that led her childhood friend to become a bandit. Once again we're supposed to feel sympathy for the country bumpkins even though they've clearly established a small-scale criminal enterprise.
This is one of those times fiction accidentally illuminates a bit of life. If we trust the narrative as presented, Kaguya's father selfishly tore her from her "pastoral roots" (lol, lmao). In reality, taking her to the capital kept her from becoming a full-fledged criminal herself (she's already stolen fruit with him!). Social filtering is not an automatic evil. Unfortunately, sometimes small exposure is all it takes to plant a rotten seed. As always with complex issues, there's no easy right or wrong answer here, but unilateral blame of the clearly loving father is a critical stance I do not accept.
Best believe somebody's payin' the Pied Piper
Five suitors come to compete for the princess, and each is outfoxed into bringing her an impossible treasure as dowry. They all fail with varying levels of honesty. Most of this is straightforward; one tries to trick her, one is tricked, a third gives up. The warrior's failure in particular is treated with style: he becomes so thoroughly spooked while hunting for a dragon that he begins to see one in every cloud and whirlpool (a great nod to how such legends begin).
The fourth and fifth suitors have much stronger effects on the princess. The fourth suitor comes back without his promised treasure and instead presents her a simple flower and a heartfelt speech. This nearly reaches Kaguya's deepest desires. To feel special and wanted and loved. Somewhere she belongs. Simple, profound, universal. And then your regularly scheduled emotional whiplash: his fat, ugly wife arrives and alerts Kaguya that she is not the first woman he's said this to. Kaguya is deeply upset by this episode, and that's when the little lad who loves berries and cream (suitor #5) breaks his neck hunting for his treasure and dies. Kaguya's spunky hijinks killed him. She knows it, too.
Our Hime-sama is already hitting a low-point, and WHAM! The award for "most uncomfortable scene in the movie" goes to the emperor's forced hug. The original story contains a thread where the "melancholic emperor turns down immortality"; these filmmakers rejected that nobility in favor of a rapey clown.
At this point in the story Kaguya's supernatural origins catch up to her. In a moment of exhaustion with these compounding grievances, Kaguya prays to the moon asking to leave the pain of earth, and... whoops, it turns out that's exactly the kind of wish the moon is equipped to deliver immediately. Only once her anguished and impulsive wish is granted does Kaguya realize that emotional pain on earth is part of the bargain of life. Relief from this suffering comes as a Faustian bargain to her—she must return to the moon, where she will forget her time on earth, both the good and the bad.
This is how the end of the story plays out. Kaguya's parents put up a noble fight but they are up against otherworldly deities (this tale seems utterly barren of any trace of Shintoism, a strange fact that is probably more consequential than this entire myth). The princess is taken back to the moon and forgets her time on earth, though traces of emotional memory remain in her soul (a wistful grayscale glance back at the colorful planet she is forced to depart forever).
"Swear not by the moon"
Kaguya informs us that "pain and sadness disappear on the moon." She goes on to explicitly state
"Once I don this robe, I shall forget everything about this place."
The movie insinuates both that she was sent to earth as a punishment and that she wanted to go to earth, in order to experience life. (Of course, this desire might be precisely what she's punished for). What we do know is that the original tale merely stipulates that her visit to earth is a punishment: the earth is where she serves a prison sentence (holy gnostic!).
Pain and sadness will "disappear" for Kaguya on the moon, but as a consequence her time on earth will be forgotten. What then was the point of all of it? What lesson does she learn? What lesson did we learn? There are three distinct perspectives to evaluate:
- Kaguya's earthly experience
- Kaguya's lunar experience
- Everyone else's earthly experience
On earth, Kaguya sings, plays, cries, works, laughs, suffers, and learns. That's life, my dear. She realizes the necessity of this synthesis before being taken away, but realization is not enough to forestall her departure.
Before her punishment, Kaguya was stirred into the desire for knowledge by the song of another tainted lunar being. When she returns to the moon after the robe of forgetfulness is forced onto her, she still manages a final look back and sheds a tear. She may not remember the experience, but it's implied that she can feel it in some subconscious (and possibly fading) sense. Do note that, during this parting scene, she has not yet made it back to the moon. What the intended effect of Kaguya's punishment was, we don't know, but it can hardly have been an effective intervention if she can't remember the lessons.
Kaguya's existence on earth is not forgotten and the pain of her sudden departure is felt with acute pain by all involved. Sutemaru dreams of her long after he's married with a child, the elderly couple drown in salty anguish, and in the original tale even the emperor gives up the opportunity to drink immortality juice if it means he has to live forever without her. Each of these parties live on with Kaguya in their memories long after she is made to forget them.
All of these circumstances meld into a coherent reality: Kaguya dies. Her departure for the moon is death on earth. The robe of forgetfulness is not hopeful in this sense; she will experience no relief from earth's problems in this afterlife. Relief requires continuity and memory to enable comparison; without memory, lunar Kaguya is a different person entirely. This is erasure, not relief. The Kaguya who lived on earth ceases to exist.
A lot of Kaguya's earlier pain and hardship needs re-evaluating after we realize that she no longer exists without it. It becomes a general statement about life, not a myth about a beautiful moon princess. Good and bad times alike are artifacts of being alive. If there's a warning in the story, it's against the impulse to be whisked away from suffering when the alternative is worse. This is the most universal experience that the film touches on, both from the perspective of Kaguya's departure and for those she leaves behind. The death of our loved ones and the death that awaits us. Everyone watching this movie (or reading this review) will be in both positions eventually.
But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us. A man can, by habit and experience, fortify himself against pain, shame, indigence, and such other accidents; but as for death, we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when we come to it.
- Montaigne
With Kaguya's death the movie has a natural finality to it, but elements of the background themes do not resolve quite neatly enough for my taste. Why does the nursery rhyme's lyrics emphasize the natural parabola of life?
"Flower, bear fruit, and die."
Kaguya flowers faster than others, but the only fruit she bears is her own beauty. With this in mind, the very last shot of the movie baffles me. Kaguya has [died] and we get... a shot of her as a baby. A state she experienced for what, two days? It's hard not to read this as a melodramatic parting shot.
"Be born, grow up, and die."
Only it's arguable if Kaguya was "born" at all, and her phase of growth was atypical, to say the least. The melancholy atmosphere of the Bamboo Cutter myth is supposed to be reflective of the overall structure of life; Kaguya's specific tragedy is that she largely existed outside of the rhythms of natural life on earth. What then is the point of seeing her again as a baby? Instead of stroking my chin in awe of how "mono no aware" this is, I found in it an unintended reminder that Kaguya did not "bear fruit" in between flowering and dying. I'm not convinced it was the right coda.
Finally, as a nod to Reisen, it's worth a footnote that moon rabbits have nothing to do with the Kaguya story.
The Tale of Princess Kaguya has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes so please do not submit my review to that site. I'm not trying to complain just to complain! For someone looking to experience the Bamboo Cutter legend for the first time, this is likely to be the most user-friendly way to do so (though I'll be checking out the Stavros translation when it's released next month). Aside from a few strange choices that reflect my own taste for pacing, the movie was entertaining for a single view (I recommend watching this with a g*rl, even if you happen to be one). Much of the art direction is a refreshing change from the norm in modern animation... especially now that animators seem to have embraced demoralizing CGI when schedules get tight. No such issues here. Pause the film and look at Kaguya's hair as she spins under the sakura.
08.10 — [This Section Under Construction]
It would be nice to be able to just watch things and not have the full machinery running in my head, but it no longer turns off. Walking down the road forces a vision of the landscape as it was 20 years ago, as it will be 20 years from now, a timelapse of my trajectory history up and down the road over the years, terminating in the present with my own afterimage overlapping and overtaking me. Even opening the fridge is a symbolic act (bro the stuff in the fridge keeps changing, I used to think it was Heraclitus' fridge but now I understand that it's another form of mono no aware, that's because it's a Samsung fridge and Samsung is South Korean, and that's basically Japan").
I think it's time for me to sleep.
2026.08.10
