The heroine of Japan's oldest surviving tale said no to the emperor

Suitors came in crowds. To the five most persistent, princes and ministers, she set tasks: bring the Buddha's stone begging bowl from India, a branch with silver roots and a golden trunk from Mount Hōrai, a robe of fire-rat fur from China, the shining jewel from a dragon's neck, the cowrie shell a swallow keeps. None of them managed it. The emperor got the same answer, and the old man heard it first: the rank would be his, the dying hers.

She could refuse the emperor; she could not refuse the Moon. "I am not of this land. I am from the capital of the Moon," she told her foster parents. "On the fifteenth of this month they will come for me." One who seemed to be the king of the heavenly people told the old man that Kaguya had committed a wrong, and that was why she had lived with him for a short while. What the wrong was, the tale never says. He said "a short while"; the old man had raised her for more than twenty years.

Her letter to her parents was already written: she left them her own robe as a keepsake and asked that on nights when the Moon comes out they look her way. Then the heavenly people brought the feathered robe of heaven. "Whoever wears it becomes someone else at heart," Kaguya says, and asks them to wait: she has one more thing to put in writing. The heavenly people hurry her; she writes calmly, to the emperor. Then the robe went on, and her pity for the old man was gone. The letters stayed behind.