Chapter 168A Glossed Uwepeker (Prose Folktale)

168.1 The prose tale in the genre system

Hokkaido Ainu oral narrative divides into three major genres: the heroic epic, the divine epic, and the prose folktale. The prose folktale is designated uwepeker ‘prose folktale’ in the Saru and Chitose dialects of southwestern Hokkaido and across much of southern Hidaka; the eastern dialects — Ishikari, Teshio, Kitami, Kushiro, Tokachi, and eastern Hidaka east of Shizunai — use tuytak for the same genre. The two terms are geographically distributed, not functionally distinct ‹consensus› Endō (2022); Satō (2008: 259). (Confusingly, tuytak designates the divine epic in Samani; the term's referent is therefore dialect-specific — see Chapter 149 (The Oral-Literature Genre System and Its Grammatical Signatures).)

What distinguishes the prose tale from the two sung genres is the complete absence of three formal features: a fixed melody, a cyclically recurring refrain (sakehe ‘refrain’), and the rhythm-stick (repni ‘rhythm-stick’) that performers and listeners use to keep time during heroic-epic recitation. The narrator speaks in an ordinary, near-conversational voice. The following table summarises the main parameters across the three major narrative genres, following (Satō 2008: 259) and (Endō 2022):

The sakehe refrain and metre of the sung genres are treated in Chapter 151 (The Sakehe Refrain, Verse Meter, and the Structure of Sung Verse). An additional prose sub-form, irupaye ‘prose rendering of a yukar’, carries heroic-epic content in prose delivery, enabling women narrators to perform yukar material without contravening the convention that verse yukar belongs to men Satō (2008: 259). The gendered allocation of genres is discussed in Chapter 145 (Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers).

Speakers themselves characterise the prose tale as serious, factual narration rather than fiction. Osuka Rieko of Shiraoi insists on the genre's truth-status, contrasting it with fabricated talk:

168.2 Sub-genre types and typical themes

Endō identifies four sub-categories within the uwepeker heading Endō (2022):

1. Human prose tales (the default type). The protagonist is an unnamed human — "the chief of ___", "a poor young man" — and the narration is in the first person with a retrospective identification at the close. The most pervasive narrative shape is the impoverished-hero tale: a young man in reduced circumstances acquires power or a spouse through courage, divine favour, or correct conduct; the arc broadly rewards good behaviour and punishes bad.
2. Kamuy prose tales (kamuy uwepeker). A deity narrates in the first person, aligning these tales with the world of divine epics despite their prose format; the language may reach into the elevated register Endō (2022).
3. Japanese-borrowed tales. Adapted Japanese narratives told in the third person — "In a certain place there lived a young lord…" — with an Ainu-inflected worldview.
4. Pananpe–Penanpe tales. A dyadic genre built around the archetypal pair pananpe ‘downstream-dweller’ ('downstream-dweller', pana-n-pe) and penanpe ‘upstream-dweller’ ('upstream-dweller', pena-n-pe). Variant forms panakuru / penakuru, with kur 'person' rather than pe 'thing, person', also occur. These tales are narrated in the third person, open with a formulaic pair-announcement, and are regarded as a children's genre Endō (2022).

The Pananpe–Penanpe opening is among the most stable formulae in the repertoire. Both characters are introduced with the existential verb an ‘exist, be’ in succession, joined by a conjunctive clause. The inferential evidential ruwe ne predicated over the whole opening grounds the state of affairs as established narrative fact (on this function see Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential)):

168.3 Opening and closing formulae

Human prose tales open with a scene-setting passage establishing the protagonist's household and livelihood: an enumeration of family members, the father's hunting activities, the household's prosperity or poverty. This is a learned formula, not an improvised description, and it recurs across narrators and dialect areas in broadly stable shape Endō (2022).

The closing formula works in the opposite direction. The narrator, who has spoken throughout as the protagonist "I", reveals the protagonist's identity at the tale's end through a retrospective disclosure. The pattern takes the shape of a quotative wrap: the protagonist's name or description appears inside a sekor ‘quotative: saying, thus’ frame, which is closed by a verb of telling — typically isoytak ‘narrate a tale’ — with explicit person marking. The formula … sekor … isoytak ('…so [so-and-so] told the story') simultaneously attributes the performance to its narrator and discloses the fourth-person protagonist's identity Endō (2022). The grammar of sekor and the interaction of the closing frame with the logophoric fourth person are treated in Chapter 105 (Quotative Complementation and Reported Speech (sekor)) and Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse).

168.4 Person of narration: the fourth-person narrator-protagonist

The default prose tale is narrated in the first person from the protagonist's viewpoint, but the person marking on verbs is the fourth person — a= (transitive subject and possessor) and =an (intransitive subject) — not the everyday first-person singular ku=. This fourth-person-as-narrative-'I' convention holds across all three major Saru/Chitose narrative genres and is the defining feature of Ainu oral narrative person-marking ‹consensus› Satō (2008: 260–261); Endō (2022); Satō (2004).

Within the prose tale, the same fourth-person forms also serve as a deferential honorific when the narrator-protagonist refers to a revered figure — an elder chief, a deity encountered in the story world, or a powerful adversary. Here a= encodes not narrative self-reference but respectful distance Satō (2008: 261); Bugaeva (2008: 40–43). Both functions, the logophoric and the honorific, are realised by the same set of forms and are distinguished by context. The full paradigm and its referential range are set out in Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing) and Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person); the narrator-as-protagonist analysis and its relation to logophoricity are treated in Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse).

Why a= rather than ku=? Two competing accounts circulate in the literature ‹contested›. The standard explanation traces the convention to a "shamaness-oracle" origin: the narrative voice is a possessing spirit speaking through the teller, making everyday first-person marking inappropriate. Satō argues instead for an indirection principle (間接性の原理): the genre originated as a god's telling inside a dream addressed to a living human, and since direct god-to-human address is taboo, the non-everyday person marking adds the necessary indirectness Satō (2008: 259–261). Bugaeva and Nikitina reanalyse the narrator-protagonist using the framework of logophoricity: the "I" of the tale is a logophoric controller, the narration is direct-style throughout, and the fourth person is the Ainu mechanism for maintaining logophoric reference across the embedded narrative Bugaeva (2008: 40–43); Nikitina & Bugaeva (2021). Whether Ainu oral narrative therefore qualifies as genuine "first-person literature" (一人称体) in the typological sense remains an open question Satō (2004); Endō (2022) ‹contested›. The person-marking architecture that makes all these functions possible is surveyed in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms).

One feature distinguishes prose-tale person-marking from that of the sung genres: the number-agreement profile. In the elevated register of heroic and divine epics, =an appears freely with a syntactically singular verb (ek-an 'I come', singular verb stem), overriding the everyday restriction that bars =an from singular stems in Saru/Chitose. Prose uwepeker does not generally exploit this override; its number agreement follows the everyday pattern ‹corpus-suggested› Satō (2008: 263).

168.5 The quotative frame and participant tracking

Because the prose tale maintains direct-voice narration throughout, and because embedded dialogue is a constant feature of the genre, the quotative complementizer sekor is dense. Speech and thought reports are framed with sekor followed by one of a small set of reporting verbs: ye 'say', hawki 'recite/say', or isoytak 'narrate'. The same frame reappears at the close of the whole performance in the retrospective identification formula discussed above Endō (2022). The construction grammar of sekor, its position with respect to tense and aspect, and the distinction between direct and indirect-style reporting in prose narrative are treated in Chapter 105 (Quotative Complementation and Reported Speech (sekor)).

Participant tracking across extended prose narration — keeping the listener oriented among multiple characters when several embedded speakers each use "I" — relies on the fourth-person / first-person contrast in conjunction with the quotative frame. The narrator-protagonist's embedded direct speech remains under the logophoric fourth person; secondary characters may receive everyday person marking. The reference-tracking apparatus is treated in Chapter 139 (Reference Tracking and Argument Continuity).

The TAM and evidential profile of prose tales — the predominance of ruwe ne as narrative-frame predicate, the aspectual distribution, and the sequencing role of conjunctive hine and akusu — is the topic of Chapter 155 (Narrative TAM and Evidential Patterning by Genre).

168.6 Register: the everyday frame and its limits

Human prose tales operate in yayan-itak ‘everyday language’ (口語・日常語), the ordinary register, in contrast to the elevated poetic language (atomte-itak ‘elegant/decorated language’, 雅語) of heroic and divine epics Satō (2008: 259); Endō (2022). Prose narration therefore avoids the hallmarks of the elevated register: the applicative case-marking prefixes (e-, o-, ko-) in place of spatial particles, the polysynthetic formulaic periphrases, and the elegant kin-term vocabulary (ona 'father', unu 'mother' as literary-register forms, against colloquial dialect variants) Endō (2022) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) 2024-06-15). The elevated register and its structural diagnostics are surveyed in Chapter 153 (The Elevated/Poetic Register: Archaic Morphology and Formulaic Diction).

The boundary is not absolute. Kamuy prose tales (kamuy uwepeker), in which a deity narrates, may draw on the elevated register, aligning their language with that of divine epics despite their prose format Endō (2022). Narrators with a broad stylistic range may also import elevated vocabulary or formulae into human prose tales, and the register of any given performance reflects the individual narrator's competence and choices. The elegant/everyday register boundary is a continuum keyed to verse-vs-prose and improvisation-vs-fixedness rather than a clean binary ‹contested› Satō (2008: 259).

The prosodic correlate of the everyday register is a characteristic intonation pattern. Tamura notes that uwepeker narration is unidirectional — the teller speaks to an audience rather than seeking a response — and the voice falls to a flat, low-variation melodic contour across sentences, in contrast to the rising contour of conversational speech where the speaker solicits a reaction Tamura (1996); the community discussion in the aynu-corpora Discord (nukopoli, 2024-11-16) confirms this datum from Tamura's account aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026). Within the Saru basin, upper-Saru (mid-river) narrators tend toward a monotone delivery while lower-Saru (downriver) narrators show more melodic undulation; this microvariation does not affect the structural grammar of the genre.