The Song the Owl God Himself Sang “Silver Droplets Fall Fall All Around,” An Ainu Tale

10.1.

Chiri Yukie (1903-22). Wikicommons.

Chiri Yukie (1903-22) was born in Horobetsu, Hokkaido to Chiri Takakichi and Nami. Nami was the daughter of a Hokkaido Ainu grandsire, Kan’nari. Yukie was the older sister of the linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-61). When she was five or six years old, she went to live in Horobetsu with her grandmother, the great bard Monashinouku. Yukie grew up listening to recitations in the oral tradition as narrated by Monashinouku and later also by her adoptive mother Kan’nari Matsu, Nami’s sister. Starting in 1909, she and Monashinouku lived with Matsu at the Episcopal Church compound in Chikabumi in the suburbs of Asahikawa. After a total of seven years of normal and higher normal school education, she attended Asahikawa Girls Vocational School for three years, graduating in 1910.

When the linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke visited Matsu in 1918 during one of his research trips to Hokkaido, he learned that Yukie, too, was versed in oral tradition. At his encouragement, she began transcription. In 1921 she sent Kindaichi a manuscript that she called A Collection of Ainu Legends (Ainu densetsushū). She stayed with the Kindaichis in Tokyo in 1922 to edit the collection for publication. Hours after completing it, she died of heart disease.

The work was published in 1923 under the title Ainu Songs of Gods (Ainu shin’yōshū) by Kyōdo Kenkyūsha, a publisher presided over by the ethnologist Yanagita Kunio. The book has been included in the Iwanami Library since 1978. In addition to Yukie’s preface, her romanized transcription of the original Ainu songs with Japanese annotations, and her modern Japanese translation, followed by Kindaichi’s afterword, the Iwanami edition appends Mashiho’s scholarly essay on songs of gods. Whereas the first edition stated that the work was “Compiled by Chiri Yukie,” the Iwanami editors corrected this to “Compiled and Translated by Chiri Yukie.”

The Japanese word shin’yō is a translation of kamuy yukar, a song in which, in principle, a nature god speaks in the first person. This is distinct from yukar, a long epic about human heroes, and uepeker, prose folk tales. Kamuy yukar, narrated in patterned literary Ainu as is yukar always contains a refrain called sakehe that differs from song to song, and often ends in a colloquial phrase like ari … kamuy yayeyukar (thus the so-and- so god sings about himself, or mimics himself in the form of a song of a god) or ari … kamuy isoytak (thus the so-and-so god tells his tale). Kamuy yukar was customarily sung by women, while yukar was traditionally sung by men, although female bards took over the latter by the mid-twentieth century when few male bards were left.

Yukie’s book contains thirteen songs of gods, such as the owl, fox, rabbit, little wolf, sea, frog, otter, and swamp mussel deities, and the spirit of the damp ground. “Silver Droplets Fall” is the first in her collection, and one of the two owl god songs. The owl (or more precisely, in Horobetsu, Blakiston’s eagle owl) is kotan-kor-kamuy, the guardian god of the kotan (hamlet).

The English translation here is based on Chiri Yukie’s Japanese translation in the Iwanami Library edition of Ainu Songs of Gods (1978). Her Japanese notes on the romanized Ainu text are also included because they provide useful information. Her spelling is retained wherever she uses Ainu expressions, although the spelling system has changed since then. Her line division is also honored as much as possible, while recent Japanese translation practice is to divide lines more closely to reflect metric patterns of the original. Another translation into Japanese of the piece by Chiri Mashiho in Appreciation of Yukar (Yukar kanshō, 1956) with his annotations and a commentary by Oda Kunio, is reproduced in Hanasaki Kōhei, The Islands Are a Festoon (Shimajima wa hanazuna, Shakai Hyōronsha, 1990). Mashiho’s version pays closer attention to the metric pattern...