The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

The film is based on a Japanese folktale called The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in which a bamboo cutter named Sanuki discovers a miniature girl inside a bamboo shoot that lit up as he approached it. Believing her to be a divine presence, Sanuki and his wife decide to raise her as their own, calling her “Princess”. The girl grows rapidly and conspicuously, causing her parents to marvel and the other children of her village to nickname her “Takenoko” meaning Little Bamboo. She develops a special relationship with a young man Sutemaru that always remained her ideal.

When Sanuki comes upon a large amount of gold in the bamboo grove in the same way he found his daughter he takes this as proof of her divine royalty and begins planning to make her a proper princess. He moves the family to the capital city. The princess is forced to leave her friends behind and finds herself in a mansion, replete with servants and fine clothes. She is also supervised by a governess who seeks to tame her and make her a proper noblewoman. She struggles with the restraints of nobility, arguing that life should be full of laughter and the healthy struggle of making her way in the world like everyone else.

When the girl comes of age, she is granted the formal name of “Princess Kaguya” for the light and life that radiates from her. In order to insert her into the the best circles Sanuki holds a celebration in commemoration of his daughter’s naming. At the celebration, Kaguya overhears partygoers ridiculing her father’s attempts to turn a peasant girl into nobility through money. Kaguya flees the capital in despair and runs back to the mountains, seeking Sutemaru and her other friends, but discovers that they have all moved away. She wanders off into the snow where she faints with the cold but then awakens to find herself back at the party.

As Kaguya grows in beauty she attracts scores of would-be suitors. Some men of noble standing court her, comparing her to mythical treasures. Not wanting to marry any of them, Kaguya tells them she will only marry whoever can bring her the mythical treasure mentioned. Two suitors unsuccessfully attempt to persuade her with counterfeits. The third abandons his conquest out of cowardice, and the fourth attempts to woo her with flattering lies and a promise of life in the countryside. When one of the men is killed in his quest, Kaguya falls into depression. Eventually, the Emperor notices her and taken with her beauty, he makes advances towards her, revolting her. Kaguya then demonstrates the ability to disappear at will, surprising the Emperor. Understanding that he has been too forward, the Emperor takes his leave, determined to still make Kaguya his wife.

Kaguya reveals to her parents that she originally came from the Moon. When the Emperor made his advances, she silently begged the Moon to help her and learned the truth. Once a resident of the Moon, she broke its laws, hoping to be exiled to Earth, so that she could experience mortal life. Now having heard her prayer, the Moon will reclaim her during the next full moon. Kaguya confesses her attachment to Earth and her reluctance to leave.

Sanuki swears to protect Kaguya and begins assembling defensive forces. Kaguya returns to her hometown in the mountains once more. She finds Sutemaru and tells him she would have been happiest with him; Sutemaru vows to protect her, and they fly through the air together. When the Moon shines upon Kaguya, she begs Sutemaru to hold her tightly. Despite Sutemaru’s best efforts, Kaguya is torn from his grasp out of the sky. He awakens alone in a field and, convinced that it had been a dream, returns to his wife and child.

On the night of the full moon, a procession of celestial beings descends from the Moon, and Sanuki is unable to stop it. An attendant offers Kaguya a robe that will erase her memories of Earth. Kaguya begs the attendant to grant her a last moment with her parents.

Thee God I come from

The attendant assures her that upon returning to the Moon, she will be free of Earth’s impurities. Kaguya rebuffs her, saying that Earth is full of wonder and life. The attendant then drapes the robe around Kaguya, and she appears to forget about her life on Earth. The procession ascends to the Moon, leaving Sanuki and his wife distraught, as Kaguya looks back one last time with tears in her eyes.

To Thee go

Thee, God, I come from, to Thee I go
THEE, God, I come from, to thee go,
All day long I like fountain flow
From thy hand out, swayed about
Mote-like in thy mighty glow.

What I know of thee I bless,
As acknowledging thy stress
On my being and as seeing
Something of thy holiness.

Getting the balance right
The story told in The Tale of Princess Kaguya highlights the difficulty of striking a healthy balance between being true to two kinds of authority both of which must be listen to and obeyed. There is an outer authority that is experienced by many as being true to the expectations of others while our inner authority asks us to be true to our own inner voice or that built into each of us when we were made in the image of God. Gen 1:27 Finding this healthy balance between these two kinds of authority causes a crisis in Kaguya’s life that we can easily identify with.

She was given a sense of her dream by her parents whose love created a home and an environment in which she was happy. This experience continued to develop by means of the friends she made among the local children but especially with Sutemaru who became the love of her life. This remained the most influential relationship for the rest of her life and always imaged for her the fulfilment of her dream. In one of Mary Lavin’s stories called, Brother Boniface she gives the following reflection of an old monk who had learned to be true to himself, to his inner voice.

Keep in touch with your dream

The call to dream dreams and see visions Acts 2:17
Brother Boniface, as an old monk recalled how as a very young lad he had discovered the stars but that in the struggle to make a living he tended to lose sight of them. One had to move beyond making a living to dream, to be enraptured by simple things, for otherwise in keeping your mind on what you are doing you forget the sky above.

He recalled that his father, to prevent him from idling had sent him to deliver messages from their shop to the monastery and though it was not very exciting it gave him a chance to dream.

“As he cycled home his sadness deepened for it seemed to him that whether you cobbled or whether you hammered, whether you weighed up rice on a scales or led a colt round and round in a ring, or whether you stood at evening in a field opening or closing your hand to let fall a shower of seeds, you had to keep your eyes upon what you were doing, and soon you forgot that there was a sky overhead and earth underfoot, and that flowers blew and even that birds sang”.

The outer authority Kaguya lived with
Kaguya’s experience of an outer authority came from the expectations of her father who burdened her with the dream he had for her. His plan was to spend a large amount of the money he found in the bamboo grove on making his daughter part of the nobility and thereby gaining entrance to it for himself and his wife. To achieve this Kaguya was asked to sacrifice her own dream of happiness that she hoped to find in the love of Sutemaru. But the dream she had of finding her happiness in love and relationships would not go away no matter how she repressed or resisted it. The nature and importance of this human dream is pithily captured in Hilaire Belloc’s poem Dedicatory Ode

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

This is the dream Kaguya wants to return to but when she goes back to her old home she finds things have changed or moved on. For example, Sutemaru has married, her home is derelict and her former friends have moved elsewhere. So she can’t return to the ‘good old days’ but must keep adjusting to the love life offers her and to the change of mind and heart needed if she is to believe in this.

Inner and outer voices

A major issue in today’s world
We can resonate with Kaguya’s predicament as we face a referendum and must each listen to these two voices of an outer and inner authority. There is a lot about trying to find the right balance between these two in the Second Vatican Council. There it was a key issue of finding the right balance between meeting our need to “dream dreams and see visions” and at the same time to meet the needs church and state. In his book called, What Happened At Vatican Two the historian John O’Malley saw this as one of three key issues of Vatican 2. He speaks of the balance the Council sought between outer and inner authority as that between vertical and horizontal relationships or between the centre and the periphery. O’Malley says:

“Vatican 2 is innovative for the pervasive emphasis it placed on horizontal relationships … and in the way it sought modulation and balance with the vertical relationships”. The Council expressed its belief that “Deep within their consciences men and women discover a law that they have not laid upon themselves but which they must obey. Its voice ever calling them to love and to do what is good and to avoid what is evil, tells them inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For they have in their hearts a law inscribed by God. Their dignity lies in observing this law, and by it they will be judged. … By conscience that law is made known in a wonderful way that is fulfilled in love for God and for one’s neighbour. Through loyalty to conscience Christians are joined in the search for truth and for the right solutions to so many moral problems that arise both in the lives of individuals and in social relationships.”

Missing our star we follow the wrong God home

The danger of ‘missing our star” and following the wrong god home
Ultimately, the inner authority each of us must be true to is based on our belief that the Holy Spirit is always leading us into all ‘the truth’ or into the love of the Father that Jesus reveals in human terms. Jn 16:13-15 We are called to this in a society which has lost a sense of an inner voice or that of a dream built into us. We are seen instead as a tabula rasa or a blank slate on which can be written what is considered to be for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. As we see today, this tends to become the greatest happiness of the few and this according to the poet William Stafford, becomes “a pattern others make for us” so that we miss our star and follow the wrong god home.

 A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park.
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford

Jesus was well aware of the darkness around us and the need we have to stay awake and listen to the word of God in spite of the difficulty we find in making space to listen to to our inner voice and to the way God speaks to this. This is the problem Jesus addresses in many of his parables but especially in the parable of the sower. This parable was particularly poignant to the first Christians as they were mystified by our reluctance to listen to our inner voice and how God confirms what it is saying to us with the word of God.

When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”….

 “Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance. Lk 8:4-15