Kobayashi Issa


Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jōdo Shinshū sect known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea. He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki — "the Great Four."
Reflecting the popularity and interest in Issa as man and poet, Japanese books on Issa outnumber those on Buson and almost equal in number those on Bashō.

Biography

Issa was born and registered as Kobayashi Nobuyuki, with a childhood name of Kobayashi Yatarō, the first son of a farmer family of Kashiwabara, now part of Shinano-machi, Shinano Province. Issa endured the loss of his mother, who died when he was three. Her death was the first of numerous difficulties young Issa suffered.
He was cared for by his grandmother, who doted on him, but his life changed again when his father remarried five years later. Issa's half-brother was born two years later. When his grandmother died when he was 14, Issa felt estranged in his own house, a lonely, moody child who preferred to wander the fields. His attitude did not please his stepmother, who, according to Lewis Mackenzie, was a "tough-fibred 'managing' woman of hard-working peasant stock."
He was sent to Edo by his father one year later to eke out a living. Nothing of the next ten years of his life is known for certain. His name was associated with Kobayashi Chikua of the Nirokuan haiku school, but their relationship is not clear. During the following years, he wandered through Japan and fought over his inheritance with his stepmother. He wrote a diary, now called Last Days of Issa's Father.
After years of legal wrangles, Issa managed to secure rights to half of the property his father left. He returned to his native village at the age of 49 and soon took a wife, Kiku. After a brief period of bliss, tragedy returned. The couple's first-born child died shortly after his birth. A daughter died less than two-and-a-half years later, inspiring Issa to write this haiku :
Issa married twice more late in his life, and through it all he produced a huge body of work.
A third child died in 1820. Then Kiku fell ill and died in 1823. "Ikinokori ikinokoritaru samusa kana" was written when Issa's wife died, when he was 61.
He died on January 5, 1828, in his native village. According to the old Japanese calendar, he died on the 19th day of Eleventh Month, Tenth Year of the Bunsei era. Since the Tenth Year of Bunsei roughly corresponds with 1827, many sources list this as his year of death.

Writings and drawings

Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku, which have won him readers up to the present day. Though his works were popular, he suffered great monetary instability. His poetry makes liberal use of local dialects and conversational phrases, and 'including many verses on plants and the lower creatures. Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures'. By contrast, Bashō's verses are comparatively few in number, about 2,000 in all. Issa's haiku were sometimes tender, but stand out most for their irreverence and wry humor, as illustrated in these verses translated by Robert Hass:
No doubt about it,
the mountain cuckoo
is a crybaby.
New Year's Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
Issa, 'with his intense personality and vital language shockingly impassioned verse...is usually considered a most conspicuous heretic to the orthodox Basho tradition'. Nevertheless, 'in that poetry and life were one in him... poetry was a diary of his heart', it is at least arguable that 'Issa could more truly be said to be Basho's heir than most of the haikai poets of the nineteenth century'.
Issa's works include haibun such as Oraga Haru and Shichiban Nikki, and he collaborated on more than 250 renku.
Issa was also known for his drawings, generally accompanying haiku: "the Buddhism of the haiku contrasts with the Zen of the sketch". His approach has been described as "similar to that of Sengai....Issa's sketches are valued for the extremity of their abbreviation, in keeping with the idea of haiku as a simplification of certain types of experience."
One of Issa's haiku, as translated by R.H. Blyth, appears in J. D. Salinger's 1961 novel, Franny and Zooey:
The same poem, in Russian translation, served as an epigraph for a novel Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, also providing the novel's title.
Another, translated by D.T. Suzuki, was written during a period of Issa's life when he was penniless and deep in debt. It reads:
Another, translated by Peter Beilenson with Harry Behn, reads:
Issa's most popular and commonly known tome, titled The Spring of My Life, is autobiographical, and its structure combines prose and haiku.

Kobayashi Issa former residence

After a big fire swept through the post station of Kashiwabara on July 24, 1827, Issa lost his house and was forced to live in his kura. "The fleas have fled from the burning house and have taken refuge with me here", says Issa. Of this same fire, he wrote: Hotarubi mo amaseba iya haya kore wa haya If you leave so much/As a firefly's glimmer, -/Good Lord! Good Heavens!'
This building, a windowless clay-walled structure, has survived, and was designated a National Historic Site of Japan in 1933.

English translations

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