Yukar

Yukar is a genre of Ainu oral literature, sagas that form a long, rich tradition of epic storytelling. In older periods the epics were performed by both men and women, but during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Ainu culture declined, women were generally the most skillful performers. Traditional yukar tales describe floating worlds, with Ainu mosir, the land of the humans, resting on the back of a fish whose movements cause earthquakes.