Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

In the Company of Issa

182 Avocations In the Company of Issa Introduction to Spring of My Life & Selected Haiku by Kobayashi Issa Kobayashi Yatarō, revered throughout the world as Issa, which means One Cup of Tea (or even One Bubble in a Cup of Tea), was born in 1763 on a farm in Kashiwabara village in central Japan, now Nagano Prefecture. The surrounding mountains of his beloved Shinano countryside are eternally associated with his name, just as the mountainous north country made famous by Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior is often referred to as “Bashō country.” But it is Issa’s unfortunate life much more than the landscape that has made him such an endearing figure. He spent most of his life obsessed with a sense of loss, exiled from his home by a stepmother so repugnant as to seem almost lifted from a fairy tale. His poverty during adulthood was so profound that he often had no home at all, sleeping at the homes of friends or students and calling himself Issa the Beggar. And yet his poems reveal an abiding love for suffering humanity, even for animals, insects, and plants, a devoutly Buddhist spiritual compassion. Fly, butterfly! I feel the dust of this world weighting my body! Issa’s poems about animals and insects are learned by every schoolchild in Japan, and almost everyone can recite a few of his poems on occasion. Writing poetry was a fundamental part of his spiritual practice, and he wrote with dedication, producing more than twenty thousand haiku, hundreds of tanka, and several works of haibun, a combination of poetic prose and haiku. Under shady trees, sharing space with a butterfly— this, too, is karma Issa never dwelled long on karma, although he must have felt that he’d sown some ugly seeds in some previous incarnation. Shortly after his second birthday, his mother died. He was sent to be raised by his grandmother, who provided for his study with a local haiku poet, Shimpo, to begin his education. When Issa was seven, his father remarried. Near his tenth birthday, his stepmother gave birth to a son. No one will ever know exactly what transpired thereafter, but years later Issa wrote that his clothes were “perpetually soaked with urine from the baby” and that he was beaten “a hundred times a day.” Whenever the baby cried, Issa was blamed and beaten. He claimed to have spent nights weeping at Myōsen Temple. Finding refuge there undoubtedly had a profound effect on the boy. He was sent to work in the fields, and his studies with Shimpo ended. When Issa was thirteen, his beloved grandmother died. His father, thinking to ease familial antagonism and suffering, sent the young poet to apprentice himself to a literary man in Edo (now Tokyo) who offered lodging in exchange for copy work. However, Issa never made use of the letter of introduction. He disappeared into busy city life, and no record of these years exists. He may have worked as a clerk at a Buddhist temple. So much money made by clever temple priests using peonies Years later, Issa would write that he often lived hungry, cold, and homeless in Edo. By the late 1780s, Issa’s name began to appear in association with a group of haiku poets studying under Chikua, who followed in the “Bashō tradition,” cultivating a plain, direct style steeped in the broth of Zen. A hundred years earlier, Bashō had single-handedly elevated haiku from a form of intellectual poetic exercise to high art. He advocated the Way of Poetry (kadō) as an alternative to the values of the emerging merchant class, also following a Way of Elegance (fuga no michi), claiming that his life was “stitched together by a single thread of art.” Bashō felt bound by “neither religious law nor popular custom,” but sought through haiku and haibun to “follow in the footsteps of the masters” of classical Chinese poetry and Zen. It is said that Bashō always carried a copy of the Taoist text Chuang Tzu and that this pre-Zen spiritual classic flavors his poetry with mono no aware, a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality, and sabi, 184 Avocations a kind of spiritual loneliness. Chuang Tzu’s lively sense of humor is also reflected in many of Bashō’s verses. The qualities of mono no aware and sabi are everywhere evident in Issa’s poetry...