Few figures from medieval literature have had the cultural afterlife of Princess Kaguya. First appearing in the late ninth- or early tenth-century tale known as The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, she remains one of Japan’s most enduring mythic figures. Across more than a millennium, Kaguya has been reimagined as tragic heroine, aloof noblewoman, cosmic deity, romantic foil, and even apocalyptic villain.
By Peter Konieczny
As an anime fan, I’m interested in how Japanese animation depicts medieval themes. The Middle Ages show up more often than you might expect—even in stories that draw on European history. Yet one medieval story that keeps resurfacing in anime is The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori Monogatari) and its mysterious heroine, Princess Kaguya.
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter tells of an elderly bamboo cutter who discovers a tiny, radiant girl inside a glowing stalk of bamboo. He and his wife raise her as their own daughter, naming her Kaguya-hime. As she grows, she becomes extraordinarily beautiful, attracting suitors from across the land. Five noblemen seek her hand in marriage, but she tests them by assigning each an impossible task—such as retrieving the Buddha’s stone begging bowl or the jewelled branch of Mount Hōrai. Each suitor fails. Even the emperor of Japan falls in love with her, but she refuses him as well.
Eventually, it is revealed that Kaguya is not of this world. She was sent from the Moon as punishment or exile and must return. Despite the sorrow of her adoptive parents—and the emperor’s attempts to prevent her departure—celestial beings descend to escort her back to the Moon. Before leaving, she gives the emperor an elixir of immortality, which he orders burned atop Mount Fuji, unwilling to live forever without her. The tale blends romance, satire, Buddhist themes of impermanence, and early science-fiction elements. Often described as Japan’s oldest prose narrative, it stands at the foundation of Japanese literary culture—and it continues to inspire anime in strikingly different ways.
Princess Kaguya has been reimagined in anime dozens of times, from her role in Sailor Moon’s wider world-building to romantic echoes in Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You. Here, though, I want to focus on four depictions that I truly loved.
1. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Studio Ghibli’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, directed by Isao Takahata, is the most traditional and recognisable retelling of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in modern anime. It follows the medieval plot closely—an elderly bamboo cutter discovers a luminous child, raises her as his daughter, and watches as her beauty draws suitors, nobles, and even an emperor into an impossible orbit. For viewers who want to see the original story brought to life rather than merely referenced or reworked, this film is the clearest starting point.
It also feels like a Studio Ghibli production in the best sense. The studio has long been known for meticulous storytelling and for drawing on older tales, folklore, and mythic motifs in ways that still feel emotionally immediate. Instead of turning Kaguya’s story into a straightforward fantasy romance, the film leans into what makes the medieval narrative linger: beauty that can’t be held, love that can’t solve everything, and a sense that joy and grief are tightly braided together.
Visually, the film sets itself apart from almost any other depiction of Kaguya. Its delicate, sketch-like lines and washes of colour evoke classical Japanese art, sometimes with the impression of a hand moving across paper in real time. The style feels intentionally fragile and fleeting, as if the world could dissolve at any moment—an aesthetic choice that fits a story shaped by impermanence.
What ultimately makes this depiction so compelling is the way it shapes Kaguya herself. She is not played as an icy, distant moon princess, but as someone intensely alive: joyful in childhood, restless when confined, and increasingly strained by the expectations placed on her body and status. Her tragedy is not only that she must leave, but that she briefly tastes freedom and affection on Earth—and knows exactly what she is losing. In this version, Kaguya remains a figure of myth, but she is also unmistakably human, and that is why the film works as both a faithful adaptation and a modern character portrait.
2. Naruto (Kaguya Ōtsutsuki Arc)
If Studio Ghibli offers the most traditional Kaguya, Naruto Shippuden delivers one of the most radical. Naruto is a long-running shōnen epic centred on ninja clans that manages to be both silly and heart-wrenching. Its world feels simultaneously medieval and modern, and it borrows heavily from Japanese legend and folkloric motifs to give its battles a larger-than-life, saga-like quality.
Kaguya enters at the climax of Naruto Shippuden not as a wistful Moon Princess, but as Kaguya Ōtsutsuki: a near-divine being tied to the origin of the series’ magic system. The story leans on recognisable elements from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter—most notably the lunar connection and Kaguya’s profound otherness—but magnifies them into cosmic scale. Instead of a celestial exile who must return to the Moon, this Kaguya becomes a catastrophic threat, recast as an ancestral force whose existence rewrites the stakes of the narrative at the very moment it is reaching its finale.
For many fans, that choice proved divisive. Kaguya arrives so late that she can feel like a new endgame introduced at the expense of the confrontation the story had been building toward for years, altering the emotional shape of the climax. And in an anime (and manga) famous for villains with vivid personalities and carefully built motivations, her storyline can seem abrupt by comparison—more like a mythic intervention than the culmination of long-running rivalries.
But Naruto’s Kaguya remains fascinating to me. On the surface she is cold, remote, and imperious. Yet the character is also written with flickers of contradiction: hints that she was not always this detached, and that beneath the goddess-like menace there is a more human core—someone capable of attachment, fear, and a warped sense of protectiveness. That tension between alien power and buried emotion makes her one of the series’ most unsettling figures, and an unexpectedly rich reimagining of the Moon Princess.
3. Kaguya-sama: Love Is War
At first glance, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War seems worlds away from medieval folklore. It is a modern romantic comedy set at an elite high school, built around an absurd premise: two brilliant student council leaders are in love with each other, but each is too proud to confess, so every episode becomes a comedic “battle” to force the other to admit their feelings first. Yet the series’ heroine, Kaguya Shinomiya, is very deliberately named for Princess Kaguya—and the connection is more than a clever reference.
This Kaguya is not an alien or a moon exile. She is a teenage girl, but one who is still defined by distance and constraint. As the daughter of a powerful, wealthy family, she lives under intense expectations and control, raised in a world where appearances matter and affection can be treated like a liability. In that sense she resembles her medieval namesake: admired from afar, seemingly unreachable, and shaped by forces larger than personal desire. The “Moon” here is not a literal place—it is the isolating social altitude of money, status, and a family system that keeps her carefully managed.
What makes the series work is how it uses comedy to reveal something surprisingly tender. Kaguya can initially come across as cold, calculating, even unlikeable—someone trained to win rather than to feel. But as the story unfolds, the mask starts to slip. Her pride becomes readable as fear, her sharpness as self-protection, and the show gradually reframes her not as an untouchable princess but as a girl who desperately wants ordinary closeness and has no idea how to ask for it. She becomes the kind of character you end up rooting for with your whole heart, because the victories she needs are emotional ones.
The anime openly nods to The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, using the Kaguya figure as a cultural shorthand for beauty, distance, and the pain of separation. The manga goes further, shaping a more explicit modern analogue to the old tale: not a moon departure, but the looming threat of family power pulling her away from the life and love she is slowly choosing for herself. In this reimagining, Kaguya’s “impossible task” is not collecting mythical treasures, but finding the courage to be vulnerable—an update that turns medieval tragedy into a modern love story without losing the original’s sense that happiness can be fragile when outside forces demand a different fate.
4. Cosmic Princess Kaguya!
The most recent—and perhaps most wild—reinterpretation of the Moon Princess comes in Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, just released on Netflix. Set in the near future, the movie incorporates AI, virtual reality, and the culture of online creators to tell a story that is both funny and genuinely loving.
This Kaguya arrives not as a tragic exile but as a free spirit escaping a boring job. She is playful, disruptive, and often troublesome to Iroha, who struggles to keep up with her unpredictable energy. Yet she still carries recognisable motifs from the medieval tale: a lunar connection, a sense of dual existence between worlds, and a destiny beyond the ordinary. She is simply a delight to watch.
Kaguya and Iroha’s story becomes its own modern take on The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter—neither nostalgic nor ironic, but imaginative and surprisingly intimate. If you’re at all the sentimental type like myself, it’s hard not to get caught up in their journey—and in the question of whether this Kaguya might finally reach the happy ending that eluded her medieval namesake.
By weaving together ancient myth and futuristic speculation, Cosmic Princess Kaguya! demonstrates once again how elastic the legend is. More than a thousand years after she first emerged from a bamboo stalk, Kaguya continues to reinvent herself—now not only as princess or villain, but as a symbol of how love can overcome destiny.
If you have the chance, explore these Kaguyas and these anime series—Naruto, if you can manage 700+ episodes—and you’ll discover some remarkable reinterpretations of a medieval story.
Few figures from medieval literature have had the cultural afterlife of Princess Kaguya. First appearing in the late ninth- or early tenth-century tale known as The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, she remains one of Japan’s most enduring mythic figures. Across more than a millennium, Kaguya has been reimagined as tragic heroine, aloof noblewoman, cosmic deity, romantic foil, and even apocalyptic villain.
By Peter Konieczny
As an anime fan, I’m interested in how Japanese animation depicts medieval themes. The Middle Ages show up more often than you might expect—even in stories that draw on European history. Yet one medieval story that keeps resurfacing in anime is The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori Monogatari) and its mysterious heroine, Princess Kaguya.
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter tells of an elderly bamboo cutter who discovers a tiny, radiant girl inside a glowing stalk of bamboo. He and his wife raise her as their own daughter, naming her Kaguya-hime. As she grows, she becomes extraordinarily beautiful, attracting suitors from across the land. Five noblemen seek her hand in marriage, but she tests them by assigning each an impossible task—such as retrieving the Buddha’s stone begging bowl or the jewelled branch of Mount Hōrai. Each suitor fails. Even the emperor of Japan falls in love with her, but she refuses him as well.
Eventually, it is revealed that Kaguya is not of this world. She was sent from the Moon as punishment or exile and must return. Despite the sorrow of her adoptive parents—and the emperor’s attempts to prevent her departure—celestial beings descend to escort her back to the Moon. Before leaving, she gives the emperor an elixir of immortality, which he orders burned atop Mount Fuji, unwilling to live forever without her. The tale blends romance, satire, Buddhist themes of impermanence, and early science-fiction elements. Often described as Japan’s oldest prose narrative, it stands at the foundation of Japanese literary culture—and it continues to inspire anime in strikingly different ways.
Princess Kaguya has been reimagined in anime dozens of times, from her role in Sailor Moon’s wider world-building to romantic echoes in Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You. Here, though, I want to focus on four depictions that I truly loved.
1. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Studio Ghibli’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, directed by Isao Takahata, is the most traditional and recognisable retelling of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in modern anime. It follows the medieval plot closely—an elderly bamboo cutter discovers a luminous child, raises her as his daughter, and watches as her beauty draws suitors, nobles, and even an emperor into an impossible orbit. For viewers who want to see the original story brought to life rather than merely referenced or reworked, this film is the clearest starting point.
It also feels like a Studio Ghibli production in the best sense. The studio has long been known for meticulous storytelling and for drawing on older tales, folklore, and mythic motifs in ways that still feel emotionally immediate. Instead of turning Kaguya’s story into a straightforward fantasy romance, the film leans into what makes the medieval narrative linger: beauty that can’t be held, love that can’t solve everything, and a sense that joy and grief are tightly braided together.
Visually, the film sets itself apart from almost any other depiction of Kaguya. Its delicate, sketch-like lines and washes of colour evoke classical Japanese art, sometimes with the impression of a hand moving across paper in real time. The style feels intentionally fragile and fleeting, as if the world could dissolve at any moment—an aesthetic choice that fits a story shaped by impermanence.
What ultimately makes this depiction so compelling is the way it shapes Kaguya herself. She is not played as an icy, distant moon princess, but as someone intensely alive: joyful in childhood, restless when confined, and increasingly strained by the expectations placed on her body and status. Her tragedy is not only that she must leave, but that she briefly tastes freedom and affection on Earth—and knows exactly what she is losing. In this version, Kaguya remains a figure of myth, but she is also unmistakably human, and that is why the film works as both a faithful adaptation and a modern character portrait.
2. Naruto (Kaguya Ōtsutsuki Arc)
If Studio Ghibli offers the most traditional Kaguya, Naruto Shippuden delivers one of the most radical. Naruto is a long-running shōnen epic centred on ninja clans that manages to be both silly and heart-wrenching. Its world feels simultaneously medieval and modern, and it borrows heavily from Japanese legend and folkloric motifs to give its battles a larger-than-life, saga-like quality.
Kaguya enters at the climax of Naruto Shippuden not as a wistful Moon Princess, but as Kaguya Ōtsutsuki: a near-divine being tied to the origin of the series’ magic system. The story leans on recognisable elements from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter—most notably the lunar connection and Kaguya’s profound otherness—but magnifies them into cosmic scale. Instead of a celestial exile who must return to the Moon, this Kaguya becomes a catastrophic threat, recast as an ancestral force whose existence rewrites the stakes of the narrative at the very moment it is reaching its finale.
For many fans, that choice proved divisive. Kaguya arrives so late that she can feel like a new endgame introduced at the expense of the confrontation the story had been building toward for years, altering the emotional shape of the climax. And in an anime (and manga) famous for villains with vivid personalities and carefully built motivations, her storyline can seem abrupt by comparison—more like a mythic intervention than the culmination of long-running rivalries.
But Naruto’s Kaguya remains fascinating to me. On the surface she is cold, remote, and imperious. Yet the character is also written with flickers of contradiction: hints that she was not always this detached, and that beneath the goddess-like menace there is a more human core—someone capable of attachment, fear, and a warped sense of protectiveness. That tension between alien power and buried emotion makes her one of the series’ most unsettling figures, and an unexpectedly rich reimagining of the Moon Princess.
3. Kaguya-sama: Love Is War
At first glance, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War seems worlds away from medieval folklore. It is a modern romantic comedy set at an elite high school, built around an absurd premise: two brilliant student council leaders are in love with each other, but each is too proud to confess, so every episode becomes a comedic “battle” to force the other to admit their feelings first. Yet the series’ heroine, Kaguya Shinomiya, is very deliberately named for Princess Kaguya—and the connection is more than a clever reference.
This Kaguya is not an alien or a moon exile. She is a teenage girl, but one who is still defined by distance and constraint. As the daughter of a powerful, wealthy family, she lives under intense expectations and control, raised in a world where appearances matter and affection can be treated like a liability. In that sense she resembles her medieval namesake: admired from afar, seemingly unreachable, and shaped by forces larger than personal desire. The “Moon” here is not a literal place—it is the isolating social altitude of money, status, and a family system that keeps her carefully managed.
What makes the series work is how it uses comedy to reveal something surprisingly tender. Kaguya can initially come across as cold, calculating, even unlikeable—someone trained to win rather than to feel. But as the story unfolds, the mask starts to slip. Her pride becomes readable as fear, her sharpness as self-protection, and the show gradually reframes her not as an untouchable princess but as a girl who desperately wants ordinary closeness and has no idea how to ask for it. She becomes the kind of character you end up rooting for with your whole heart, because the victories she needs are emotional ones.
The anime openly nods to The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, using the Kaguya figure as a cultural shorthand for beauty, distance, and the pain of separation. The manga goes further, shaping a more explicit modern analogue to the old tale: not a moon departure, but the looming threat of family power pulling her away from the life and love she is slowly choosing for herself. In this reimagining, Kaguya’s “impossible task” is not collecting mythical treasures, but finding the courage to be vulnerable—an update that turns medieval tragedy into a modern love story without losing the original’s sense that happiness can be fragile when outside forces demand a different fate.
4. Cosmic Princess Kaguya!
The most recent—and perhaps most wild—reinterpretation of the Moon Princess comes in Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, just released on Netflix. Set in the near future, the movie incorporates AI, virtual reality, and the culture of online creators to tell a story that is both funny and genuinely loving.
This Kaguya arrives not as a tragic exile but as a free spirit escaping a boring job. She is playful, disruptive, and often troublesome to Iroha, who struggles to keep up with her unpredictable energy. Yet she still carries recognisable motifs from the medieval tale: a lunar connection, a sense of dual existence between worlds, and a destiny beyond the ordinary. She is simply a delight to watch.
Kaguya and Iroha’s story becomes its own modern take on The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter—neither nostalgic nor ironic, but imaginative and surprisingly intimate. If you’re at all the sentimental type like myself, it’s hard not to get caught up in their journey—and in the question of whether this Kaguya might finally reach the happy ending that eluded her medieval namesake.
By weaving together ancient myth and futuristic speculation, Cosmic Princess Kaguya! demonstrates once again how elastic the legend is. More than a thousand years after she first emerged from a bamboo stalk, Kaguya continues to reinvent herself—now not only as princess or villain, but as a symbol of how love can overcome destiny.
If you have the chance, explore these Kaguyas and these anime series—Naruto, if you can manage 700+ episodes—and you’ll discover some remarkable reinterpretations of a medieval story.
Peter Konieczny is editor of Medievalists.net
Subscribe to Medievalverse
Related Posts