The poetic technique of Yukari-Kotoba in the Japanese literary and oral tradition

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to determine, based on a wide range of literary and folklore material, how and in what capacity the yukari-kotoba technique, based on the homonymy of the Japanese language and performing game functions in popular culture, penetrated into the literary tradition, and also became widespread in Japanese folk fairy-tale prose. The scientific novelty lies in a comprehensive approach to the study of this poetic technique. Previously considered exclusively literary, this technique is being studied for the first time on folklore material. For the first time, the very concept of Japanese entertaining fairy tales is introduced into scientific circulation, concrete examples show what their national specifics are and how exactly the yukari-kotoba technique is used in them. As a result, it is shown that the yukari-kotoba poetic technique, based on homonymy and phonetic possibilities of the Japanese language, played an important plot role in Japanese poetry, offering to see additional information hidden in the main text of the poem. In folklore entertaining fairy tales, this technique played a genre-forming role, that is, it transformed fairy tales into entertaining ones.