Ethnospecificity of the Image of an Amazing Woman in Japanese Folk Tales “Kaguya-hime, the Maiden of the Moonlight”, “The Crane”, and “The Snow Maiden”

The article analyses the Japanese fairy tales "Kaguya-hime, the Maiden of the Moonlight", "The Crane" and "The Snow Maiden", whose main characters are close in their semantics to Japanese goddesses. The characteristic features of the poetics of these fairy tales are the absence of a happy ending, tragedy, and the connection of the heroines with the elements, astral images, and the world of birds and animals. Through the motif of metamorphosis, these three tales reveal the theme of unhappy love. The image of Kaguya-hime can be interpreted in two ways: 1) the visible signs of an adult beauty are only a mask under which a child is hiding, and 2) the protagonist is a stranger who realizes that her life among people is temporary, here she must gain certain experience, go through a series of trials, and then return to her real home (the Moon) as a different person. The second model associates Kaguya-hime with the heroines of fairy tales from different nations because she also needs to go through the ritual of rebirth (life-death-life) and metaphorical initiation into adulthood. But while the heroes of European fairy tales leave their home (the "human world"), enter the forest or the thirty-ninth realm (a foreign space), and go through trials there, for Kaguya-hime, the foreign space is the human world (the Earth), and the Moon is her native space to which she later returns. Therefore, the role of the spatial planes through which the protagonist passes is mirrored in this Japanese fairy tale. Accordingly, Kaguya-hime herself is associated with a goddess who briefly appears in the life of an old couple and makes them happy. She enters the world of people with the help of a bamboo stalk, which acquires the semantics of a "door" between time and space planes, magically connected to the Moon and the other world. Kaguya-hime gives her foster parents her love and material values: the old man begins to find silver coins in the bamboo stalks every day. Silver is associated with the moonlight. Thus, at the very beginning of the tale, the connection between Kaguya-hime and the Moon is outlined. The motif of the magical endowment of the parents of the miracle girl with silver and gold by the Grandfather-knows-everything (the Sun, not the Moon) is found in the Ukrainian fairy tale "How a Herder's Daughter Became a Queen". The amazing heroine of the fairy tale "The Crane" is similar to the enchanted beauty from the Ukrainian fairy tale "The Bird Girl". In both texts, an amazing girl appears as an assistant to the protagonist, helping him to become rich by using the magic of weaving. However, whereas in the Japanese tale, the man loses his wife by breaking his promise (he spies on the woman's work and sees her as a bird), the Ukrainian tale has a happy ending. The difference between the two texts also lies in the prerequisites for establishing a marriage relationship between a female bird and a man. In the tale "The Crane", a young man helps a wounded bird to heal and at the same time, he does not expect to meet her again, as a human. In the Ukrainian fairy tale, the bird seeks rebirth through death: she asks the young man to behead her so that she can become his wife. The characters of the Ukrainian fairy tale "The Cane Girl" are partly similar to the characters of the fairy tales "Kaguya-hime, the Maiden of the Moonlight", and "The Crane". Yuki-Onna, the wonderful woman from the tale "The Snow Maiden", has vivid ethno-psychological specificity, tends to be the goddess of death, and is associated with rituals of transition. The heroine first initiates the young man Minokita into the mystery of life-death-life (killing his old master in front of him) and thus contributes to the hero's age-related initiation, later becomes his faithful wife and reveals her demonic nature after her husband breaks his vow. An important place in the poetics of the analyzed tales is occupied by images-symbols of the moon, bamboo, silver, bird, feathers, night, winter, snow, river, boundary, and Death.