What is kamuy yukar (カムイユカㇻ)?
— the kamuy tells its own story, in the first person

Meaning

Kamuy yukar is a form of Ainu oral literature in which a kamuy (a deity) speaks as "I" and tells what happened to it.

The reciter is human, but the "I" of the song is the kamuy — an owl, a wolf, a hare, each speaking of itself. The thirteen songs that Chiri Yukie wrote down and translated into Japanese are of this form.

How it works

• Told in the first person — "I did this," says the kamuy. The human is on the listening side.
• A refrain — each song carries a refrain called sakehe, repeated at set intervals. The title of each of the thirteen songs is taken from that repeated line.
• Carried by voice — these songs are passed on not in writing but by listening, remembering and reciting. They are still recited and still studied today.

Chiri's book is laid out as facing pages: Ainu in roman letters on the left, a Japanese translation on the right. The first song opens like this.

Shirokanipe ranran pishkan,
konkanipe ranran pishkan.

"Silver droplets falling, falling all around; golden droplets falling, falling all around."

Source: the opening of Ainu shin'yōshū (Aozora Bunko; base text Iwanami Bunko, from the Kyōdo Kenkyūsha edition of 1923).

No writing system is not the same as no record

The Ainu language had no script. But that does not mean there was no record. It was held in the voice, in the form of song.

What Chiri Yukie did was to move it onto paper — devising the way to write it as she went: Ainu sounds in roman letters, with a Japanese translation beside them. She decided herself to set two languages on one page.

⚠️To say that she "created a script" is not accurate. What she assembled was a method for writing Ainu in roman letters.

Fragments where this word appears

• Chiri Yukie (the thirteen songs of Ainu shin'yōshū, and their preface) — ep. #011

(The detailed page for this fragment is not yet available in English.)

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