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“THe uNIveRSe IS MADe OF STORIeS, not atoms,”18 poet Muriel Rukeyser once said. Whether it be the entire cosmos or a speck within it, stories hold their blueprint for existence, stories give them purpose, and stories are the web that binds them together. The life of our universe is one immense adventure story. Our Mother Planet’s life is the story of evolution, the birth of our stars is the story of the Big Bang. These stories are essential to life, and that makes storytelling essential to the human experience. “For Mongolians, a person who cannot play a morin khour [a traditional stringed instrument] or sing a song is not a human being,”19 * says Oyun, a nomadic Mongolian storyteller. As individuals and as cultures, we need stories for survival and renewal. In 1870, a !Kung San (Bushman) in South Africa spoke such yearning from his jail cell: “I sit waiting for the time to come that I may listen to all the people’s stories . . . I do merely listen . . . turn my ears backwards to the heels of my feet on which I wait, so that I can feel that a story is in the wind.”20 More recently Shiro Kayano, a storyteller of the Ainu tribe of Hokkaido Island in northernmost Japan, voiced the cultural importance of stories in this way: “My father saved all of our family’s extra money to buy a tape recorder. This was such an expensive thing for him to buy. I didn’t understand then the importance of what he was doing. You see, with no written language, our people were superb storytellers. The stories contained all the wisdom of our people. My father has now recorded more than five hundred hours of Ainu stories that would have been lost.”21 (The minority Ainu were rapidly losing their stories due to Japan’s official program for the extinction of the Ainu culture.) Had those stories been lost, Ainu culture would have died. The people, yet needing story in order to survive, would have adopted the stories of the dominant culture. In effect, this would make them Japanese—the end result of the process we call assimilation. Story is power. Ignored, it will kill. Honored, it will bring life. Let us take the example of Shiro Kayano’s father and listen to our culture’s storytellers to learn our stories. At the same time, let us find and embrace the storyteller within. Story and storyteller will then become one, and we will find that story is life and life is story. l * All quotes are reproduced exactly as found in their original sources, with no attempt to conform them to contemporary rules of grammar and usage. ฀ 2 Introduction Story Is Life ...

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