竹取物語 (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter) — 多読＆精読リーダー（全5章・全20段落）

Long ago, there lived an old man whose job was cutting bamboo in the woods and making baskets and boxes from it. One morning, while he was walking deep in the bamboo forest, he noticed one bamboo stalk shining brightly at its base. Wondering what was inside, he walked closer and carefully cut it open.

To his surprise, sitting inside the shining bamboo was a tiny girl who was only about ten centimeters tall! Because the old man and his wife had no children of their own, he gently held the little girl in his hands and brought her home. From that day on, whenever he cut bamboo in the woods, he found gold inside it, and the poor couple soon became very rich.

Kept warm in a small basket, the girl grew up much faster than any ordinary child. In just three months, she became a young woman of such great beauty that the whole house seemed to be filled with soft light, leaving not a single dark corner. Anyone who looked at her face forgot both their anger and their pain.

The old man invited a wise priest to give her a name, and she was named "Kaguya-hime," which means "the Shining Princess of the Night." Before long, news of her beauty spread throughout the land. The more young men heard about Kaguya-hime, the more strongly they wished to catch even a glimpse of her.

Many men stood outside the fence of the old man's house day and night, trying to look through small holes in the wall. Most of them finally gave up and went home because nobody in the house answered their letters. However, five noble princes remained outside, coming every day whether it rained or snowed.

Seeing how earnest the five princes were, the old man said to Kaguya-hime, "I am already over seventy years old, and I do not know when I will die. Please marry one of these five noble men so that I can die in peace." Kaguya-hime answered quietly, "How can I marry a man without knowing whether his heart is true? People say they love me, but words are easy to speak."

Then Kaguya-hime added, "I will marry the prince who brings me the treasure that I wish to see." She gave each of the five princes a different, almost impossible task: the stone bowl of Buddha from India, a branch of silver and gold from a magic mountain in the eastern sea, a coat made from the fur of a fire-rat in China, a shining jewel from a dragon's neck, and a lucky shell held by a swallow.

Instead of traveling to foreign lands, the first two princes tried to win her heart with lies. The first prince brought an old stone bowl from a temple in Kyoto, but Kaguya-hime saw through his lie at once because the bowl did not shine at all. The second prince secretly paid skilled craftsmen to make a fake jeweled branch, but while he was boasting about his dangerous sea voyage, the craftsmen came to the door shouting, "Please pay us for making the branch!"

The third prince paid a large amount of gold to a merchant from China and got a beautiful blue fur coat in a jeweled box. Believing that it was the real coat of the fire-rat, he proudly brought it to Kaguya-hime. However, she said, "If this coat is truly real, it will not burn in fire. Let us test it now." When the old man threw the coat into the fire, it burned up with a bright flame in just a second!

The fourth and fifth princes tried to get the real treasures by themselves, but they failed as well. The fourth prince sailed out to sea to hunt a dragon, only to be caught in such a terrible storm that he almost lost his life. The fifth prince climbed up to a high roof to take a shell from a swallow's nest, but the rope broke and he fell hard on his back. Thus, none of the five princes succeeded.

Soon, the Emperor (Mikado) heard about the girl who had refused five noble princes, and he sent a messenger to invite her to the palace. Even though becoming the Emperor's lady was the highest honor in the land, Kaguya-hime refused. "If I were forced to go to the palace," she said sadly, "I would melt away like a shadow and die."

Curious to see her with his own eyes, the Emperor visited the old man's house during a hunting trip. The moment he saw Kaguya-hime shining softly in her room, he realized that she was not an ordinary human being. Respecting her wish, the Emperor returned to the palace without taking her away, and for the next three years, the two exchanged warm letters and poems that comforted each other's hearts.

In the spring of the fourth year, a strange change came over Kaguya-hime. Every night, she sat on the porch looking up at the moon and cried as if her heart would break. As the full moon of August drew nearer, she could neither eat nor sleep because of her deep sorrow.

Worried out of his mind, the old man held her hands and asked, "My dear child, why do you look at the moon with such sad eyes? Tell me what is making you suffer so much!" Wiping her tears, Kaguya-hime finally confessed the secret that she had kept in her heart for a long time.

"I am not a person of this earth," Kaguya-hime said softly. "I came from the capital of the Moon. Because of a past mistake, I was sent down to live on this earth for a short period. Now that my time here is over, my people from the Moon will come to take me back on the fifteenth night of this month. I am crying because I do not want to leave you and Mother, who have raised me with such warm love."

When the Emperor heard this from the crying old man, he immediately sent a general with two thousand brave soldiers to protect Kaguya-hime. On the night of the full moon, a thousand soldiers stood on the roof and another thousand surrounded the walls with bows in their hands, while the old wife held Kaguya-hime tightly inside a locked room.

Around midnight, the sky above the house suddenly shone ten times brighter than midday. Down from the sky came the people of the Moon, standing quietly on white clouds about two meters above the ground. Strangely, the two thousand soldiers lost all their strength to fight, and the locked doors of the house opened by themselves!

A heavenly messenger brought a shining flying carriage and two treasures: a magic coat called the "Robe of Feathers" (hagoromo) and a small jar of medicine that gave eternal life. Anyone who put on the Robe of Feathers would immediately lose their human heart and forget all their memories and sadness on the earth.

Knowing that she would forget everything as soon as she wore the robe, Kaguya-hime said, "Please wait just a moment! Before I put on that robe, I must write one last letter." With tears falling on the paper, she wrote a letter of gratitude to her old parents, and another letter to the Emperor, leaving the jar of medicine with her letter for him. The moment the robe was placed on her shoulders, her sadness vanished, and she rose silently into the night sky.

When the Emperor read her letter and received the medicine, he felt too sad to wish for eternal life. "What is the use of living forever if I can never see Kaguya-hime again?" he said. He asked his men which mountain was the closest to heaven, and they answered that it was the great mountain in Suruga. At the top of that mountain, his soldiers burned the letter and the medicine of immortality, and people say that the smoke of the Emperor's love still rises from what we now call Mount Fuji.