Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie’s “Ainu Shin’yōshū” by Sarah M. Strong (review)

Ainu Spirits Singing is a welcome study and translation of the thirteen kamui yukar (chants, or songs, of spiritual beings) committed to writing by a young Ainu woman, Chiri Yukie (1903–1922). Yukar are first-person narratives, so the human chanter takes on the persona of the spirit being—an owl, otter, fox, and so on. This is the first complete English translation of Chiri’s work available, supplementing the late Donald L. Philippi’s translation of three kamui yukar in his Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu (Princeton University Press, 1979).

Before presenting her translations of these thirteen chants, Sarah Strong provides significant background information to help the reader appreciate them. Chapter 1 introduces Chiri and information on how the text Ainu Shin’yōshū came to be produced. Chapter 2 presents the lived world of the Ainu as recalled in the yukar by focusing on their experience of the landscape and nonhuman forms of life. Chapter 3 turns to look at Ainu social structures and interpersonal relationships, as well as Ainu relationships with the spirit beings in their world. Finally, chapters 4 and 5 delve into the variety of different spirit beings in the Ainu cosmos and their interactions with human beings. Strong has good control of the Japanese secondary literature on the Ainu and, more specifically, on these yukar.

Strong only briefly addresses what one might call the politics of translating these oral performative chants into Japanese for Japanese readers in the early twentieth century. I wish that she had done more, for there was an important and fascinating set of figures involved in this story, including the English missionary John Batchelor, himself married to an Ainu woman and the author of several ethnographic works; the most famous Japanese scholar of the Ainu, Kinda’ichi Kyōsuke; and the folklorist Yanagita Kunio. The Ainu have played a complex role in the collective imagination of the Japanese, much as American Indians have in the American imagination. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Native Americans and the Ainu were often portrayed as vanishing races, while the dominant society in each land recorded information about their respective cultures as “salvage ethnography.” I wish Strong had pursued the issue of why Chiri presented herself in print as the voice of a vanishing people.

This full story remains to be told; here it is merely hinted at. Instead, it quickly becomes apparent that Strong is less interested in the politics of twentieth-century representation(s) of the Ainu than she is in conjuring up the lost world of this people. She suggests that, prior to the Edo and Meiji periods, the Ainu lived in an enchanted natural world. In this, Strong follows Chiri’s lead in her own sentimental preface to the original edition of Ainu Shin’yōshū, translated on pages 195–96 of the book under review. Chiri’s work offers, in a stylized—I almost want to say “ritualized”—prose, translations of Ainu chants to a Japanese readership and, more broadly, to the members of the capitalist world that have destroyed the Ainu land and culture; Ainu Shin’yōshū can thus be seen as a last gift from a dying culture.

Chiri suffered from a congenital heart condition and died at age nineteen, just days after finishing the final corrections of a typed version of her manuscript. Her work on the manuscript may have hastened her death, which might therefore be seen as self-sacrificial. This opens up the possibility of exploring Chiri’s death in relation to the Ainu understanding of the gift-giving gesture. In particular, there seem to be interesting parallels between the transformative acts of the otter spirit being in yukar number 8 and Chiri’s self-sacrifice and offering of these narrative chants.

Educated in missionary schools, Chiri was...