You Love to See It: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

"Papa, if your happiness depends on wearing the cap of a court official, then I will go to his majesty as you wish, and after you have put on that cap as part of the court, I will kill myself." Chloë Grace Moretz’s quietly resigned delivery of that line in the English language version of The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Isao Takahata’s devastating swan song of a final film, has lived in my head rent-free since I first saw it in early 2017. For the archetypal figure of the princess, suicide is the last bastion of self-determination, an escape no social structure or domineering spouse or parent can wrest from a woman’s grasp. The body is both prison and key, each inextricable from the other.

It’s part of what makes the film’s ending so devastating. We have to watch not just as Kaguya loses her adopted family, already estranged from her by their decision to take her from the mountains into the capital, but as she loses the power to determine whether she lives or dies. Her monologue about feeling that suffering and misery are a worthwhile exchange for the wonders of nature and the joys of loving and being loved is cut brutally short when a handmaiden of the moon drapes an enchanted robe over her shoulders and washes her clean of her mortal memories and emotions. Oblivion delivered with gentle, unobtrusive presumption in the space of an instant.

What’s left to a woman once suicide has been closed off to her? In a paradoxical way it’s worse than death itself, to be trapped eternally in sedate numbness, swallowed up by the form and function of society. Watching the expression vanish from Kaguya’s face as she turns from the mortal world and ascends into the heavens, looking back only once with an ambiguous expression of surprise or perhaps loss, is almost unbearable. She’s a woman being stolen from herself, her attempt to escape her stifling life as a desired princess in the capital only bringing her into a vaster and more inflexible hierarchy, one where she lacks even the feedom to suffer.