An old bamboo-cutter, poor and childless, finds a tiny radiant child inside a glowing bamboo stem and raises her as his own. Named Princess Moonlight for the soft light that shines from her, she grows into a beauty whose fame draws five faithful Knights to keep vigil outside her house through winter and summer. To test them she sets five impossible quests — the stone bowl of Buddha, a jeweled branch from the tree of Mount Horai, the skin of the fire-rat, the five-coloured jewel from a dragon's head, and the shell a swallow carries — and every suitor fails, or cheats and is found out. Even the Emperor cannot win her, for Princess Moonlight is a child of the Moon, and when her people come for her across the sky she must say farewell to the parents who loved her — the oldest story in Japan, the Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter, from the tenth century.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
From Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki (1908), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
