Yetgeul › Japan

Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter)竹取物語

Unknown · Written in the late 9th or early 10th century · Japan · 9 sections · 18,739 Chinese characters

The oldest tale that survives in Japan. A child who came out of a bamboo stalk grows up, turns away in turn the suits of five noblemen and of the emperor, and returns to the moon. What she asks the five to bring is in every case a thing not to be had in this world — the stone begging bowl of the Buddha from India, the jeweled branch of Hōrai, the fur robe of the fire rat, the jewel on a dragon's neck, the koyasugai of the swallow — and each of them cheats and contrives and comes to disgrace. Why smoke rises from the summit of Fuji is set down at the end of this tale as well.

Nine segments and 39 paragraphs fully translated. The character counts were matched against the source text segment by segment, and the nine segments were confirmed to differ by not a single character. Since this is not classical Chinese but mixed Japanese-and-Chinese writing, not only the Chinese graphs but every character was counted. The segments have no names of their own, so rather than attaching later people's titles such as 「the stone begging bowl of the Buddha」, they are left as first through ninth, by the numbers the source text gives them. Of the source text's ruby glosses only the base characters are kept, and the repetition mark 〳〵 is left as the source text shows it. The stories often end in wordplay — hachi (begging bowl, shame), kai (shellfish, worth), Fuji (the mountain with many soldiers) — and where the sounds overlap, a word of explanation is set out in the translation.

Listen to this bookPlay Store