Thesis

A close watch makes clear a cyclical pattern: built into the original story’s parody/criticism of the nobility, Takahata extends it into a deeper critique of the aristocracy & social striving, but also a critique of the nihilism of its apparent superior, Buddhism.¹

After finding Kaguya, the bamboo wood cutter raises her with his aged wife as his own ordinary daughter. Kaguya is happy, growing up poor but beloved, playing in the woods with the peasant children, seeing the cycles of nature go round and round:

Round, round, go round, Waterwheel, go round
Go round, and call Mr. Sun
Go round, and call Mr. Sun
Birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, flowers
Bring spring and summer, fall and winter
Bring spring and summer, fall and winter
…Teach me how to feel
If I hear that you pine for me, I will return to you.

Or at least, she is happy until he discovers in the same woods gold & kimonos, apparently intended for her. Her father takes the heaven-sent gold and kimonos, and, well-intentioned, becomes convinced that Kaguya’s life must be uprooted and destroyed because Heaven intends she become a princess and live a more blessed life than the toil of a peasant. Moving to the capital of Kyoto, he sets up a mansion and Kaguya’s education as a proper young aristocrat, but, slowly forgetting his original goal (her happiness), he increasingly becomes obsessed with her social advancement & integration into high society. Moving to the capital, despite granting her access to high culture and beautiful clothes and gardens and parties, renders her miserable by coming with the distortions of rank and hierarchy and inbred court customs.

Kaguya initially delights in the beautiful kimonos & wardrobes she is given as part of her new life, and civilized refinements like burning perfumed incense into clothes. But soon they become a burden as she is forbidden to play or act like a child (or human), or have pets; she is taught to write and be educated, but forbidden from drawing or cartooning; she is forced to engage in eyebrow plucking and teeth blackening (the latter reputedly invented to hide an empress’s decayed teeth and then became tradition in the precedent & status-mad Heian aristocracy) to meet arbitrary social standards; her popularity renders her unable to go out to see cherry blossoms; the nobles who court her turn out to be incompetent buffoons, earnest fools, or lying knaves; a party supposedly in her honor shunts her off to a side room and turns out to be an occasion for the ‘noblemen’ to get drunk & exchange insults; all of this goes to feed the greed of the nobility for women they have hardly seen, and her ultimate reward for satisfying her father’s ambitions? To become subject to the emperor’s assumption he can rape any woman he pleases.²

At the party, in one of the most striking sequences, Kaguya flees in a rage through the monochrome night back to her old home which she pines for; the mountain and forest are dead, but a charcoal maker tells her that life will return; vanishing, the ragged Kaguya appears to collapse in the snow, alone—waking up back at the party. At the end, she meets her childhood friend, now a grown adult, and confesses her love to him, saying it’s too late for them to live happily together; together, they jump off a cliff and fly across the countryside, invisible, until Kaguya is pilled to the Moon by an inexorable force—but again she is back at the capital.

What do these sequences imply? As so often in Takahata’s movies (Grave of the Fireflies, Pom-poko), suicide makes an appearance: these are two possible rejection reactions, disappearing and dying as a penniless beggar, and a love-suicide—both possible futures are, however, futile. In the first, leaving her role in human society renders her an outcast without any position, to die alone of exposure; and in the second, a death pact solves nothing, merely killing her friend/would-be lover and returning her to the Moon quicker. Finally, trapped, she resolves to commit suicide if she must become the Emperor’s woman.

People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.

Beautiful clothes should be something to rejoice in; parties should be occasions for fun and festivity; young children should be able to play freely and have pets; one should choose freely one’s husband; one should live a long life before dying; all of these things should be blessings, and not curses.

Antithesis

In the end, Kaguya feels only sorrow, and rejects her mortal life, and the Moon’s Buddha (in full Buddhist-Indian regalia & retinue, to make it impossible to miss the point) returns to take her back to the Moon; only then does she remember her life in the Moon and pining after mortal life’s joys & sorrows amidst the peace of the grave of the Moon. She had longed for life on Earth instead of the emptiness of celestial enlightenment, but she could remain on Earth only so long as she desired to, and mistakes were made—too late does she accept her life as a whole, too late does she yearn to remain, to live as an ordinary human being. (“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”)

That the pleasure arising to man
from contact with sensible objects,
is to be relinquished because accompanied by pain—
such is the reasoning of fools.
The kernels of the paddy, rich with finest white grains, What man, seeking his own true interest,
would fling them away
because of a covering of husk and dust?

Synthesis

The feeling one is left with is Fujiwara no Teika’s yūgen: a mysterious feeling of depth. Kaguya arrives in mystery, walks in beauty, and departs in sorrow. Was it a war, or poetic punishment? Takahata avoids ever explicitly choosing, leaving the viewer in doubt and uncertainty—but, perhaps, renewed.

In the end, there is only silence; in the end, there is only the sublime; in the end, there is only life, passing through spring, summer, fall, winter, with the birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, flowers…