Ainu are indigenous people of northeast Asia. While their cultures, histories, and origins have captured scholarly attention for a long time, book-length manuscripts treating Ainu are still few and most are in the Japanese language. Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’y?sh? is therefore a welcome addition to the field of Ainu studies, Japan studies, indigenous studies in other parts of the world, anthropology, folklore, and literature. This book enriches our understanding of the contents and contexts of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’y?sh? (Collection of Ainu Chants of Spiritual Beings) and also provides important discussions of Ainu cosmology by conceptualizing Ainu landscapes and seascapes through human-animal social relations.
The objective of Strong’s book is not merely to provide the first full English translations of thirteen kamui yukar (Ainu oral narratives in the first-person voices of nonhuman spiritual beings) in Ainu Shin’y?sh?; it is also to understand the life of the woman behind them, Chiri Yukie, a prominent Ainu woman who passed away at the age of nineteen in 1922; the circumstances and trajectory of the posthumous publication of her Ainu Shin’y?sh?; and to illuminate the “living world” of the Ainu Shin’y?sh? by exploring physical, social, and spiritual environments introduced therein. Strong’s analysis of the Ainu Shin’y?sh? unwraps Ainu spiritual ecology and worldview, which were tightly and meticulously woven into kamuy yukar by Chiri and her Ainu ancestors. Strong examines Chiri’s Shin’y?sh? not simply as indigenous oral literature but also as a representation of Ainu culture and ecology in the Horobetsu area of Hokkaido.
The book begins with a discussion of socio-political contexts through which Chiri lived. The first chapter reveals the historical relationships between ethnic Japanese and Ainu and the tropes of social evolutionism, and this is crucial in understanding the importance of the Ainu Shin’y?sh?. The four chapters that follow explore Ainu ecology and cosmology as a context for understanding kamui yukar. It should be noted that the Japanese colonization and industrial development of Ainu homelands began earlier in coastal areas than the interior. One unfortunate consequence of this is that ethnographic records that would help us gain a better idea of the cultural and historical ecologies of coastal Ainu are difficult to come by. This book helps fill this gap by incorporating Ainu geographic names and the wisdom embroiled in Chiri’s Ainu Shin’y?sh?, not to mention other available ethnological literature. By examining nonhuman characters in the Ainu Shin’y?sh?, Strong elucidates Ainu landscapes that are understood as social relations among humans and between humans and spiritual beings. The last chapter is a full English translation of Ainu Shin’y?sh?. In the translated version, Strong includes the original footnotes that Chiri provided for readers, acknowledging Chiri’s wish for her book to be a source for learning about Ainu cultures and social practices.
One of the many notable things about Strong’s work is its organization. She has arranged the book’s contents in such a way that allows readers to interact with the Ainu Shin’y?sh? on their own terms. Including numerous photographs of coastal landscapes and living beings in Horobetsu, her broad and multifaceted introduction to kamui yukar in the Ainu Shin’y?sh? amounts to approximately two hundred pages. The kamui yukar translations come after this, totaling about fifty pages. Strong’s decision to re-arrange the order of Chiri’s thirteen kamui yukar seems to be an appropriate one as the new order suits her thick description of the Ainu Shin’y?sh? and her clearly stated objectives.
Strong provides no closing chapter following her translations. By omitting such a section the author sends a message that readers should draw final conclusions for themselves regarding the full meaning of Chiri’s kamui yukar, and the multifaceted contexts presented in Ainu Shin’y?sh?. Strong’s exploration of Ainu-nonhuman relations might have been enriched, however, had she expanded the discussion of Ainu environmental ethics and traditional ecological knowledge enmeshed in the text of the Ainu Shin’y?sh?. She rightly states that, “For the Ainu, the resources of the natural world, especially the resources of the river on which so much of life depends, are not givens to be plundered at will but physical and spiritual matrixes whose capacity to regenerate life depends on the participation of human beings” (177-178), but this matter could have been discussed further at the end of the book. An inconclusive ending may have been the author’s intention, though. As previously stated, in the course of the book Strong provides readers with a broad and multifaceted introduction to the history and cultural geography of the coastal Ainu as it relates to Chiri’s Ainu Shin’y?sh?. It is simply up to readers to explore kamui yukar further within their own inquiries of how indigenous Ainu cultivated their landscapes and seascapes while maintaining a balanced reciprocal relationship with nonhuman actors (spiritual beings) in their coastal environments.
Ainu Spirits Singing is well written, and it is easy to read and follow the author’s discussion. The book vividly captures and merges natural and cultural landscapes of coastal Ainu while accurately illustrating the socio-political climate in which Chiri Yukie lived and the Ainu Shin’y?sh? was published. The author suggests that Chiri Yukie herself realized the value of her writing of the Ainu Shin’y?sh? as a resource for teaching others about traditional Ainu social practices (180), and adds, “Among the many values the Ainu Shin’y?sh? and, indeed, the entire record of Ainu oral traditions hold for modern readers is their testament to the vitality and richness of now-vanished or highly compromised ecologies and the opportunity that they offer to experience, through the mediation of narrative, species killed off by modern humans” (143). In addition to achieving the objectives she sets out in the book, the author also succeeds in respecting and realizing what Chiri wished for with the publication of her Ainu Shin’y?sh?.
For a course reading as well as a scholarly reference, I highly recommend this important work as a very accessible and comprehensive guide in English to the living world of kamui yukar and Ainu cosmology.
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[Review length: 993 words • Review posted on April 25, 2012]