Kobayashi Issa Biography and List of Works

Eighteenth-century Japanese poet, who used the simple pen name Issa and who is probably the best loved of the haiku masters. Issa's life was full of misfortunes - he lost his mother at an early age, his stepmother mistreated him, he suffered from poverty, his children died and his marriage with his second wife was unhappy. However, Issa's poems reflected small joys of life. He used dialect and colloquial language when depicting rural life and everyday events. As a poet Issa was more robust and subjective compared to ascetic, priestly Basho and worldly, sophisticated Buson. By confessing his doubts and loneliness in highly personal haiku, Issa's poems also have given consolation to generations of readers. One of the famous haiku in Oragaharu is said to have been written by Issa when he was a child:

Come with me and play
Parentless sparrow

Kobayashi Issa was born in Kashiwabara, Shinano province (now part of Shinano Town, Nagano Prefecture), as a son of a farmer. He began writing haiku as a young child, and in 1777, at the age of fourteen, he was sent by his father to Edo (Tokyo today), where he studied haiku under the poets Mizoguchi Sogan and Norokuan Chikua (died 1790).

A one-foot waterfall -
   it too makes noises,
     and the night is cool.

Issa's works gained the attention Seibi Natsume, who became his patron. In 1793 he took the pen name Issa and travelled in the south-western Japan. After the journey he published a collection of verse, TABISHUI (1975). Issa visited and lived at various places, including Kyoto, Osaka, Nagasaki, Matsuyama and other cities. In the 1810s he returned to his home in Kashiwabara, enjoying there the reputation of the leader of the haiku world in northern Shinano.

So this is where
I end up living -
Five feet of snow.

Where I come from
Even flies
Bite.

Issa was a prolific writer of both poetry and prose. He treated his subjects with humour, excelling particularly at affectionate portrayals of such creatures as fleas, frogs and sparrows. During his lifetime Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku, close observations of nature required by traditional expression, but also passing but meaningful personal incidents, and poems based on his own life, in which Issa often used words of the daily conversations. A number of hardships brought distrust and alienation in Issa's life. - Among Issa's famous works are CHICHI NO SHUEN NIKKI (1801), and Oragaharu (1819, tr. The Year of My Life), where he recreated poignant evocations of personal tragedy. Issa died on January 5, 1827 in Kashiwabara (in some sources the date is 19.11.1827).

My grumbling wife -
   if only she were here!
     This moon tonight...

Haiku: Japan's most popular unrhymed poetic form. Haiku consist of 17 syllables arranged in three lines containing five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Traditionally the haiku focused on the natural world, the fleeting moment, but then it became a vehicle to express a wide range of attitudes about almost any subject. Outstanding haiku masters: Bashõ, Buson (1716-1783), Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Haiku's emphasis on the immediate and concrete influenced early 20th century Imaginism in Europe and America, especially through the efforts of Ezra Pound.

Tanka: A Japanese fixed form of verse of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the other seven (5-7-5-7-7). Tanka focuses on the essence of one static event, image, mood.

For further reading: Cool Melons- Turn to Frogs! : The Life and Poems of Issa by Matthew Gollub el al (1998 - note: introductory work for chidren); The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, ed. by Robert Hass (1994); Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, With Selected Examples by Kenneth Yasuda (1994); A History of Japanese Literature, vol. 3, by Shuichi Kato (1983); Of This World: A Poet's Life in Poetry by Richard Lewis (1965); Orphan Sparrow by Lewis Mackenzie (1957); Issa: The Autumn Wind by Lewis Mackenzie (1957); The Haiku Handbook by William Higgins; The Age of Meiji by Shuichi Kato ( in A History of Japanese Literature, vol. 3

TABISHUI, (1795)