The "taketori Story" Is Not Old Fool Thinking

Toketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), also known as Taketori no Okina no Monogatari or Kaguya Hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya), is considered the oldest narrative in Japanese literary tradition. The exact date of composition or author is unknown, and the earliest manuscript copy was finished during the Momoyama period. It is one of the earliest narratives written in Kana. On the composition of Toketori Monogatari, Mazuda Katumi (1985) pointed out, that Toketori Monogatari was first widely circulated as a kind of oral literature, which also added to it the plots of many folklores. Then this entire work was finished.There have been lots of studies on Toketori Monogatari, among which Chinese scholars focus more on the tales of proposal in Toketori Monogatari while Japanese counterparts make comprehensive researches on the interpretation of the text, its analysis from the perspective of folklore, the meaning of its literary passing on and the influence of Chinese thought. Based on the previous studies, this paper focuses on interpreting the text and analyzes the capacity and the transfiguration of Chinese idea of immortality in Toketori Monogatari by studying its last section. Meanwhile, it grasps the Japanese nation's original thinking of life and death by sorting out the description of life and death in the previous classical books in Japanese literature such as Kojiki, and Manyousyuu, so as to explore the coexisting and compatibility between Japanese nation's idea of life and death and Chinese thought of immortality. This paper hopes to analyze the writing styles of Japanese classical literature and the idea of life and death in it.