The original version of The Tale of The Bamboo Cutter ends with Kaguya’s upset and despairing departure from the earth for the moon. The emperor, determinant to delete all his memories with Kaguya, burned a letter and a jar containing an elixir of immortality, which were the only things that Kaguya left before returning to the moon, on the summit of the Fuji Mountain, which was considered the place closest to the moon. Although different adaptations that were introduced on previous pages all have this sad and hopeless ending, they adopted different strategies either to give new interpretations of the original story, or to add modern elements to make it more readable for the young generation audiences. Here, I will majorly focus on the two movies, The Princess from the Moon, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, as well as the story mentioned in Pokemon.

At the end of the amination movie, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Kaguya’s memories were not deleted after wearing the celestial robe of feathers, which can be recognized through her tears when she left the earth. In a review article about this movie, Kaguya’s departure was not considered as “going home” to the moon, but instead, as “going home” to the death (Jackson, 2015). Although it remains to be question whether her birth place was on the earth, her first identify is definitely a girl from the moon. But Kaguya was raised on the earth. The earth was the place where her “parents”, the bamboo cutter couple, took care of her, where she met her true lover, Sutemaru, and where she had played with nature. She considered herself as a normal person on the earth, no matter what her actual identity was. All of her happiness, sadness, excitement, and love were related only to her experiences on the earth. The strong desire of Kaguya for playing with nature, which was highly emphasized in this movie, was believed to “evaluate the anime’s connections between human and nonhuman nature” (Bryce and Davis, 2015), and this interpretation could only hold when Kaguya is treated as a human being. In the movie, Kaguya understood that once she left the earth and “came back” to the moon, she would no longer have such a lovely nature to play with, a man like Sutemaru who she loved so much, or all other kind people that she had encountered. Life without any of these was meaningless, and meaningless life was no better than death. Therefore, Kaguya existed in the movie actually as a normal person living on the earth, and Kaguya’s tears when she left the earth could be seen as her despair toward her “death” and her farewell toward her “life”. This conflict between life and death was intensified at the end of the movie, by showing her self-identification as a human being living on the earth.

In the movie, The Princess from the Moon, and the story mentioned in Pokemon, instead of new interpretations of Kaguya’s identity, modern elements were added to the end, in order to reconstruct Kaguya’s departure. In The Princess from the Moon, a spacecraft-like object, instead of a group of people, arrived at the Imperial Palace to take Kaguya back. In Pokemon, Kaguya herself was depicted as a rocket, which use gas as an energy resource to return to the moon. The spacecraft and the rocket elements originated from modern science technology and these innovative adaptations could be made possible only in today’s world where spacecrafts and rockets have been created and seen by people. With these modern elements, the young audiences will be more likely to accept and have interest in the old original story. Also, these new elements can trigger people’s thinking about how traditional Japanese folklore can survive and be integrated into today’s society.

In conclusion, today’s adaptations of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, although all following a similar theme, have different endings to help the audiences reinterpret the Kaguya story. Such reinterpretation can be concerning Kaguya’s actual identity, or about the possibility of adding new elements that are easier to be accepted by the young audiences. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutterhas become one of the most popular Japanese story that can be reused in today’s culture innovation, and Kaguya, the princess whose beauty is still mysterious and whose miserable life is sympathized, never loses her charm and continues to arouse the audiences’ imagination.