Hokkaidō Museum of Literature

This guide to the Hokkaidō Museum of Literature in Sapporo centers on a slim, pencil-ruled manuscript in its cases, copied out by nineteen-year-old Chiri Yukie the night she died in a borrowed Tokyo room. It follows the Ainu yukar she was transcribing, chants believed to carry the voice of a spirit and passed down only by ear, never meant to be written at all. You'll hear about her grandmother Monashinouku, one of the last fluent reciters, and her aunt Imekanu, who filled roughly one hundred sixty notebooks trying to preserve the same songs. Look closely at the two columns on the page, one phonetic Ainu, one Japanese, set down in the same careful hand.