The life of Kobayashi Yataro (or Kobayashi Nobuyuki, 1763–1828) was filled with sorrow: his mother died when he was three years old, and he was raised by his grandmother. His father remarried when Issa was eight. His stepmother and stepbrother tormented him. His father was a farmer and may have entertained little interest in Issa’s education. At fourteen, when his beloved grandmother died, Issa left home, intending to study poetry in Edo (modern Tokyo), but at that age, with little prospect for work or schooling, he became an impoverished wanderer.
We know little of his whereabouts until he married later at fifty-one, but the four children of the couple died young, and Issa’s wife died when he was sixty-one. Issa had first published poems at thirty, infused by the masterful work of Basho and Buson. By this time he had puslished copiously but was largely ignored. He had no disciples or successors, and had taken up residence in a hermit’s hut. The poems are sentimental and their subjects are simple, haiku befitting his personality: insects, moon-gazing, seasonal depictions of autumn and winter, reflections of simplicity. He tried to marry again but the marriages were unsuccessful, and at this time Issa suffered a palsy that limited his movement. At one point he pursued the status of his father’s house and farm only to discover that his step-brother had maneuvered to exclude him from any share.
How could the poems not reflect this melancholy life? Yet along the way, too, he had become a lay Buddhist monk, and while this larger framework accommodates his poems, it also sharpens his perspective on the natural world around him, giving his poetry a vehicle for modest expression of his personal philosophy. Issa’s poetry is heartfelt, without a trace of affectation.
Being raised so harshly, Issa grew to accept nature and its variety literally, lacking the art of abstraction and the sophisticated philosophizing of more privileged poets. Instead, Issa shows himself sentimental, projecting himself into the pity he feels for the smallest, lowliest creatures. His appreciation includes standards subjects: the manifest phenomena of trees, moon, flowers, and landscapes. Such is Issa’s way to make sense of an obdurate world, parallel to the world of his childhood, but in this grasping at meaning is a poetic literalism that reveals the secrets of impermanence.
At the same time, Issa adds a sense of humor to his insight, turning what the educated poet might call irony into a harsh and intractable reality nevertheless touched with grace. When a shed burns down, Issa notes how the fleas have moved into his hut, and his poem wavers between outright humor and pity in the realization. The flea is as worthy a topic for a poem as for reflections on the universe. R. H. Blyth (in his History of Haiku, v. 2, p. 353) notes that Issa wrote dozens of haiku featuring small creatures: “54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 100 on fleas, nearly 90 on the cicada, and about 70 on various other insects.” Such haiku emphasize the independence in Issa’s spirit, a subtle contrast between the realities of nature versus the abstractions of the privileged, who do not truly know nature. Issa’s haiku are unconventional, though at the same time he does cite, to our relief, the expected plum and cherry blossoms, nightingale, pine trees, winter showers, autumn moon, the cuckoo, and dew.
What a sign of impermanence is dew! Issa’s famous poem on the death of his second little daughter:
This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet.
But while he learned from Basho and Buson, Issa did not imitate them, if only because his sensibilities were radically different. Thus, unlike those iconic poets, Issa had no disciples or successors. How could anyone reproduce the circumstances of his life that created his unique poetry? For a little while he relucrtantly did teach students. It was an economic convenience that drove the hermit to fulfill the expectations of the pedagogy of the day, which enjoibed entertaining students with stories and anecdotes. Thus, in one instance, Issa travels to Edo to see prisoners in stocks (or equivalent) and relates the story to his students to amuse them. What a discomfiting chore! How odious to entertain others! As scholar Makoto Ueda puts it: “A hermit with no interest in mundane affairs would have found such a life painful.” (Dew on the Grass: the Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, by Makoto Ueda. Leiden: Brill, 2004).
Like Ryokan, Issa is conscious of the painful episodes of life that still haunt him:
Outliving them,
Outliving them all, –
Ah, the cold!
And the hermit’s life has no secure resting-place, though that is the nature of things:
In this fleeting world
Even that little bird
Makes himself a nest.
I, too,
Have no dwelling place,
This autumn evening.
Yet:
This autumn evening
The pine tree trees too
Are companions of old age.
The world’s ills, however, are worse than Issa’s discomforts.
Cherry blossoms are blooming,
In a corner pf this transitory world,
Full of greed and egoism.
In later years, Issa became the classic hermit. His poems reveal a simplicity of life and direct observation. Like Ryokan, Issa is candid in admitting the difficulties of his eremitic life. In one instance, he wonders if his effort is enough. Enlightenment is perhaps just this understanding. At the age of fifty, worn from life’s vicissitudea, the hermit Issa proclaims that from that point on he will deem every day, and all of nature, a wonderful gift. As Blyth puts it, “Whatever joys his life had so far held for him, they had been earned by fifty years of hardship. From now on, the beautiful sky of the new year and the sky of every day until he died would be a joy granted. … And yet at the same time, the sky is not that of Paradise, but of this worldly world of ours.”
Getting nearer,
And nearer Paradise,
And oh, the cold!