Issa

Kobayashi Issa’s mother died when he was young. His father remarried a woman who beat and berated Issa whenever his half-brother misbehaved. Issa left the family farm and moved to Edo as a teenager where he drifted among the artistic class. After his father died, Issa spent a decade wresting his inheritance away from his stepmother and half-brother. When he finally won, Issa moved back home and started a family. Over the next few years, his three sons, daughter, and wife died. He remarried, divorced, suffered a series of small strokes that left him partially paralyzed, then remarried again. When his house burned down, Issa moved himself and his pregnant wife into a storehouse where he fell ill and died before the birth of his only surviving child. His masterpiece is the journal written during the year his first daughter died, Spring of My Life, where haiku about dragonflies, thunder, and fleas hang between those about his daughter.

So many breezes
wander through my summer room:
but never enough


My home is so poor
even the resident fleas
keep their family small


Tearfully, the child
begs me to pick the full moon
from the evening sky


The world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh and yet…


That fat toad looks like
he just burped a huge cloud
filling the sky


The red flower
you always wanted to pick—
now this autumn wind


With just the slightest
parting of my lips, thousands
of plovers take flight


What’s said of snowmen
doesn’t last any longer
than the snowmen


Trembling helplessly
like a solitary heart,
this pampas grass stalk


Thus spring begins: old
stupidities repeated,
new errors invented