Taketori Monogatari

The Taketori Monogatari is the earliest extant work of Japanese prose narrative, composed in the late ninth or early tenth century. A bamboo-cutter known as Sanuki no Miyatsuko finds a small girl inside a shining bamboo stalk and raises her at home. She grows in three months and is named Nayotake no Kaguya-hime. Five noble suitors propose; she demands impossible gifts - the Buddha's stone begging bowl, a jewelled branch of Horai, a robe of fire-rat fur, a jewel from a dragon's neck, a swallow's easy-birth shell - and all fail. She refuses even the emperor's suit. On the fifteenth night of the eighth month, heavenly attendants come to take her back to the moon; she leaves the elixir of immortality and a letter behind. The emperor has the elixir burned on the summit of Mount Fuji, and the smoke is said to still rise. Reception begins with the reference in the Eawase chapter of the Genji Monogatari, which calls it 'the ancestor of the tales'; a related variant is preserved in volume 31 of the Konjaku Monogatarishu. The Shogakukan Shin-Hen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshu provides the standard modern critical edition.