Little Labors

Princess Kaguya

The baby seems younger today, her hand reaching out, grasping and ungrasping like a sea anemone. I pick up something I have read before, something especially short; I have the baby bound and burritoed in a thin blanket next to me, I position her on her side, so she can stare at the black-and-white notecards slotted between the sofa cushions, and she seems content, and I read the story again; the story, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, is based on a Japanese myth at least 1,200 years old.

The tale tells of an elderly bamboo cutter who one day comes across a glowing stalk of bamboo. Inside the stalk, he finds a tiny, tiny baby girl. He brings the girl home and he and his wife raise her as their own. The previously poor and childless couple now find gold each time they go out to cut more bamboo. The girl grows quickly into the most beautiful girl in the land, drawing the notice even of the Emperor. But the girl is moody. She has no interest in suitors. She spends a lot of time looking at the night sky. One day, a spaceship arrives; it turns out the girl is from another planet! The gold in the bamboo was a gift in thanks to her adoptive parents for keeping her safe; there had been war on her planet, but now it was time for her to return to where she truly belonged. The girl boards the spaceship and leaves, forever.

Suddenly the strange old myth seems to be just a straightforward and basically realistic tale about babies: their arrival feels supernatural, they seem to come from another world, life near them takes on a certain unaccountable richness, and they are certain, eventually, to leave you. A more “realistic” description of a baby — e.g., “born after a seventeen-hour labor… at 7 pounds 11 ounces… nursing every two hours… smiling at eight weeks, grasping at twelve weeks…”—misses most everything. Only the supernatural gets at the actual. Or so it can seem to a mother on a good day, at least to the mother of a relatively easy baby, who is lying on her side, looking at a picture of an owl.