In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 C H A P T E R O N E ChiriYukie and the Origins of the Ainu Shin’yōshū On a page of a small, paperbound notebook, now fragile with age and carefully preserved in the home of Yokoyama Mutsumi in Noboribetsu, Japan, there are a set of phrases—not sentences, but pieces of sentence— written in a quick, cursive Japanese hand. A glance at the text suggests that the phrases are fragments of the writer’s private thoughts, never intended for anyone but their author’s eyes, and without sufficient context to allow a second party to follow their meaning. But there is a title, “Dream Talk” (Yume no hanashi), and a subtitle, “My Grandmother’s Voice That Spoke, Passing on the Tales” (Kataritsutaeta huchi no koe). Looking at these two titles we can guess that the writer has recently woken from a dream in which she heard her Ainu grandmother’s voice. We can guess that the grandmother is Ainu—an indigenous people of northern Japan—because the writer uses the Ainu word for “grandmother ,” huchi, to refer to her. We can speculate that the voice the writer heard in her dream was reciting traditional chants, for these above all were what was “passed on” in oral Ainu culture. Memories of dreams are easily lost. Clearly, there was something moving about this dream that made the writer want to hold on to it. Perhaps while it was still dark she reached for her notebook to record just enough of the experience to help her recall it in the future.1 With the title and subtitle as our guide we can begin to make sense of the fragments that follow. In the first two lines the writer seems to be describing her grandmother’s chanting voice when she writes, “forever, 2 Chiri Yukie and the Origins of the Ainu Shin’yōshū inexhaustibly” and “ceaselessly, ceaselessly, onward” always “at the same pace.” These phrases readily evoke both the vast scope of the Ainu oral legacy and the measured cadence of the delivery of many of its genres. But in emphasizing qualities of ceaselessness and rhythmical flow, the writer seems also to be suggesting a river, perhaps a metaphorical river of vocal sound. The suggestion of a symbolic river quickly switches to the concrete in the third line as the writer jots down “Okachipe River,” following this immediately with fresh lines, “Okachipetsu,” and “Ukatchiupet.” With each iteration the writer appears to move farther from the current Japanese name and closer to her grandmother’s old Ainu name for this stream that flows through hilly land on the southern coast of Hokkaido in northern Japan.2 The memory of the sound of her grandmother’s chanting voice and that of the river are seamlessly blended. The writer ends the page with what seems clearly to be a sigh of longing for this place of childhood, for the “small birds” and “the chestnuts and willows” that graced the river’s banks. The writer of these fragments was Chiri Yukie (1903–1922), a young Horobetsu Ainu woman whose hometown was Noboribetsu on the southern coast of Hokkaido. Her grandmother was Monashnouk (1848–1931), a bard of the Horobetsu Ainu tradition who commanded a vast repertoire of chants and stories. As was often the case with female reciters, Monashnouk was understood by family and community members to be a shamaness , someone with special powers of discernment, healing, and divination.3 We know that Chiri Yukie wrote this page in her notebook sometime in the late summer of 1922 when she was in Tokyo, at the urging of Kinda’ichi Kyōsuke (1882–1971), a linguist and scholar of the Japanese and Ainu languages . Despite fears about her health—she suffered from congenital heart disease—Yukie had left her native island of Hokkaido and ventured to the much warmer and more congested metropolis of Tokyo in order to “offer reference materials” to Kinda’ichi and to be his Ainu language conversation partner (Chiri Y. 1996, 54, 107, 123). The materials she offered to Kinda’ichi were the oral traditions of her people, especially those she had learned from Monashnouk.4 As Chiri Yukie and her family members had feared, the summer heat of Tokyo and the work of transcription as well as of domestic tasks of child care and sewing that had been assigned to her in the Kinda’ichi home [3.142.197.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 18:01 GMT...

Share