竹取物語

About this story

作品について

Part 2 covers the middle of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter: the five impossible tasks. This is the comic heart of the tale. Each nobleman fails in his own way. One brings a sooty bowl from a nearby temple, one has a fake made in secret, one is cheated by a merchant, one is beaten by a storm, and one falls from a swallow's nest. Several of the episodes end with a joke about where a word comes from: 恥を捨てる (to throw away one's shame), あえない (all too brief) and かいがない (all for nothing). These are puns, not real word histories, but they are more than a thousand years old, and the words are still in everyday use. The story calls faraway places by their old names, and this digest keeps them: 天竺 for India, 唐 for China, 蓬莱 for the magic mountain in the sea. You can tap each one to see what it means. As in Part 1, this is our own retelling in easy modern Japanese, with furigana on every kanji and grammar around JLPT N4 to N3. If you have not read Part 1 yet, start there.