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  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa’s most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the tradition of Basho’s famous Narrow Road to the Interior.

  In addition to The Spring of My Life, the translator has included more than 160 of Issa’s best haiku and an introduction providing essential information on Issa’s life and valuable comments on translating (and reading) haiku.

  SAM HAMILL has translated more than two dozen books from ancient Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, and Estonian. He has published fourteen volumes of original poetry. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Fund. He was awarded the Decoración de la Universidad de Carabobo in Venezuela, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry from Washington Poets Association, and the PEN American Freedom to Write Award. He cofounded and served as Editor at Copper Canyon Press for thirty-two years and is the Director of Poets Against War.

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  THE SPRING OF MY LIFE

  And Selected Haiku

  by Kobayashi Issa

  Translated from the Japanese by

  Sam Hamill

  Illustrated by Kaji Aso

  SHAMBHALA

  Boston & London

  2013

  Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  Horticultural Hall

  300 Massachusetts Avenue

  Boston, Massachusetts 02115

  www.shambhala.com

  © 1997 by Sam Hamill

  Illustrations © 1997 by Kaji Aso

  Cover art: Ancient City Under Dragon’s Eye by Kaji Aso. Watercolor and gouache, 1996.

  Portions of this book have been published previously in The American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, and Five Points. Some of the haiku were included in The Sound of Water: Haiku by Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets (Shambhala Publications, 1995). Several haiku have been revised for this edition.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kobayashi, Issa, 1763–1827.

  Spring of my life and selected haiku/by Kobayashi Issa; translated by Sam Hamill.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2828-5

  ISBN 978-1-57062-144-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Kobayashi, Issa, d1763–1827—Translations into English.

  I. Hamill, Sam. II. Title.

  PL797.2.A24 1997 97-7530

  895.6′134—dc21 CIP

  For Hayden Carruth and Denise Levertov

  And for Brother Yusuke

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  The Spring of My Life

  Selected Haiku

  Notes

  Index of First Lines

  About the Translator and the Artist

  E-mail Sign-Up

  Translator’s Introduction

  Kobayashi Yatarō, revered throughout the world as Issa, which means One 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 1880s, 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, 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; sabi is derived from sabishi, meaning “loneliness,” a word he used again and again. His early haiku often reveal the profound influence of Bashō despite sometimes slipping into self-pity. Issa, like Bashō, went to school on the poetry of the great poet-monk Saigyō, who brought the distinct flavor of Zen to Japanese “nature poetry” in the twelfth century. Issa’s
own unique voice emerged fully only after years of daily practice and a profound assimilation of Buddhist ethics and poetry classics.

  In early 1792, at age twenty-nine, he vowed to follow the Way of Poetry. He gave up the name Yatarō, and “began the new year anew” as Issa, living the life of a solitary sojourner for ten years as he explored Japan from its southern tip and eastern islands to the western Sea of Japan. Taking Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior as a model, he traveled not for recreation or to find a tourist’s view of his world, but to find himself. Issa the Beggar was born in the conviction that poetry can be a path to enlightenment. He believed that one part of that path is shikan, a meditative state in which perception is utterly free of discrimination between mind and matter, self and object; where the only permanence is impermanence and change, whether subtle or violent, remains the essence of being.

  Just being alive!

  —miraculous to be in

  cherry blossom shadows!

  The cherry blossom in classical Japanese poetry represents much more than the beauty of the blossoms themselves. Because of the brevity of its life, a cherry blossom is a supreme figure of mono no aware, its beauty intensified because of its temporality. All great Japanese poems about cherry blossoms express a tinge of sadness, usually indirectly. “Just being alive!” may celebrate the beauty of the day, of the moment, but the blossoms suggest that life is brief and that we, too, shall soon disappear.

  Loneliness already

  planted with each seed in

  morning glory beds

  “Haya sabishi (the loneliness is already there),” Issa says. There is loneliness in the first act, in the seed itself. Death and life are present in a cherry seed or morning glory seed and within the wandering poet. An old Zen proverb suggests “Live as though you were already dead!” The seed of death and the seed of life are one.

  In the haiku tradition, the poem springs from attentive observation of ordinary life. Issa was a master at revealing the unsayable dimensions of the mundane, his poems always somehow conveying more than what the words alone suggest.

  Simply for all this,

  as if there were nothing else,

  heavy wet spring frost

  In the hands of a lesser poet, this poem would drown in pseudoprofundity. Issa’s gift is representative simplicity: “Simply for all this.” There is no placement of detailed landscape. Issa enters the world of frost. It is almost rice-planting time, a task Bashō called “the beginning of culture.” The spring calls forth ancient traditions and labors and all their consequences. It represents an end to winter, and by the lunar calendar, a beginning of a new year. Issa’s restraint allows for complex evocation while acknowledging that utter simplicity underlies it all.

  Issa was not the least bit reluctant to engage his imagination to manipulate circumstances to benefit his work. In The Spring of My Life (Oraga haru), he presented what would become one of his most famous haiku as having been composed upon the death of his daughter:

  This world of dew

  is only the world of dew—

  and yet . . . oh and yet . . .

  Tsuyu no yo wa

  tsuyu no yo nagara

  sarinagara

  Nobuyuki Yuasa points out in his 1960 translation of Oraga haru that this poem actually was composed earlier, upon the death of Issa’s firstborn son. Whether Issa found no voice in direct response to his daughter’s death or whether he simply thought the previous poem said it best doesn’t really matter. Issa attributed the poem in a way that best suited the work in progress. In this, too, he followed Bashō’s example.

  Subject to the severe mood swings and almost constant undertone of melancholy that are a signature of abused children, Issa found both a spiritual path and a source of emotional stability in following the Way of Haiku. The Spring of My Life, his most famous work, represents a single year chosen almost at random, but is inspired and shaped by all of a fully lived life. This magnum opus is not just a notebook and an anthology, but also a testament and a sanctuary. Perhaps the most literal translation of the title would be simply “My New Spring,” but while haru indeed means spring, in Japanese vernacular it refers to the New Year. On the lunar calendar, the first day of spring and the New Year often coincide.

  Like Bashō, Issa did not settle immediately on the pen name by which he is known today. Earlier names included “Kobayashi Ikyo” and “Nirokuan Kikumei.” Although he showed great promise at an early age, he was not satisfied for settling for mere popularity, and in 1792, he adopted the nom-de-plume Haikai-ji Nyudo Issa-bo, Temple of Haiku Lay Brother Issa.

  With spring’s arrival,

  Yatarō becomes reborn

  as Issabo

  Haru tatsuya

  Yatarō aratame

  Issabo

  He explained to a friend that his choice was inspired by a single bubble in a cup of tea rather than the tea itself, as the name would ordinarily suggest. He was not particularly fond of the tea ceremony as such, but felt that, like the bubble, our lives are brief and transparent. That poetry in general and haiku in particular indeed became his temple, and he a lay monk in its service, is beyond doubt. He took his vows seriously, and from that day on he lived a life of commitment.

  Issa spent the following five or six years wandering throughout southern Japan, making “poetry friends” along the way. It was only after his return to Edo in 1778 that publication of his journals began to make him famous. Although less formally composed than The Spring of My Life, they reveal his deep study of Chinese poetry, anthologize many haiku and tanka by Japanese poets, and offer a view of Issa as a working poet who eagerly revised his poems, often leaving as many as six or seven “finished” versions of the same haiku.

  In 1801, Issa’s father was overcome with typhoid fever. Issa returned to Kashiwabara in time to nurse his father for a month before he finally succumbed. Issa’s stepmother and stepbrother challenged his father’s will, successfully depriving Issa of his inheritance for thirteen years. The poet wrote a poetic journal about his father’s death, much of it marred by relentless, albeit understandable, sentimentality and self-pity.

  For more than a decade, Issa lived in poverty, traveling back and forth between his native village and Edo, locked in a legal battle with his stepmother. These years weighed heavily on him. As he approached the age of fifty, he must have felt the family’s internecine quarrels would never end. In 1810, he wrote:

  O moonlit blossoms—

  I’ve squandered forty-nine years

  walking beneath you

  Finally, in 1813, negotiations with his family were completed and Issa returned to Kashiwabara. He married a young woman, and in 1816, she gave birth to a son who survived only a month. It was for this child that Issa wrote the “world of dew” poem. A daughter was born in 1818, only to die of smallpox a year later. It is this daughter, Sato, who is memorialized in The Spring of My Life, composed the following year.

  Issa’s life was plagued by sorrow. His second son, born in 1820, died several months after his birth. In 1822, a third son was born, but Issa’s wife died painfully of illnesses related to arthritis shortly after his birth, and the boy died a few months later, in 1823, while in the care of an irresponsible nurse. During these years Issa also suffered failing health that resulted in periodic paralysis. In 1810, having temporarily lost his ability to speak, he had written:

  Such irritation!

  Even wandering wild geese

  can manage to speak

  The poet recovered time and again from what may have been a series of small strokes, and married again in 1824, probably too soon, for this marriage dissolved in a matter of months. He had chosen for his new wife a woman from an esteemed local samurai family, and she apparently viewed his house and his ramshackle life with contempt, returning to her father’s home after no more than a few weeks of marriage. Issa was overcome by some form of paralysis again while visiting Zenkō Temple and remained for a time in the care of a physician.


  Seemingly undaunted, in 1826, at the age of sixty-four, he married for a third time. But the following year, his house caught fire and burned to the ground. Refusing offers to stay with students or friends, Issa and his pregnant wife moved into a tiny storehouse with neither windows nor stove, where they lived for several months. By all appearances, he seemed well on his way to overcoming this latest disaster when he died suddenly on November 19, 1827. His death prevented him from seeing the birth of his only surviving child, a daughter.

  Two poems are attributed as Issa’s last. One was found under his deathbed pillow:

  Gratitude for gifts,

  even snow on my bedspread

  a gift from the Pure Land

  The other “death poem” may indeed be his last, especially if he deliberately placed the above, written earlier, as a final statement to be read following his death, which seems likely. The second poem:

  From birthing’s washbowl

  to the washbowl of the dead—

  blathering nonsense!

  Like so many of Issa’s poems, this one invites several readings. Is the “blathering nonsense” the noisy busyness of suffering humanity and the world of desire, or has the poet come to a concluding caustic comment on his own life of letters? Is the poem an admonishment or a joke, a summation or a guffaw? Perhaps Issa had in mind the teaching of the Samantabhadra Bodhisattva Sutra that “the self is empty of independent existence,” and all the “blathering nonsense” is the ambient noise of needless desire. Behind Issa’s seemingly effortless simplicity, time and again, we find a complex universe.

  If his life was shaped by intense feelings of exile and rejection, and punctuated by deep personal loss, it was shaped equally by remarkable courage and fearless conviction. In his day, as now, a monklike vow to live in the service of poetry was rare. Issa’s faith in poetry as a path to enlightenment required living in accordance with what he had learned from noble old masters like Tu Fu, Po Chu-i, Saigyō, and Bashō. Issa paid no obeisance to rank, and roamed the streets of Edo in shabby robes, almost as famous for his behavior as for his verse. Once, summoned by a local daimyo, he was questioned about his art. Issa looked squarely into the eyes of the most dangerous man in the province and replied that he could not reduce his art to the level of dilettantes. Yet to most people he was a gentle eccentric. Children came to revere him as the poet-representative of small birds, bugs, and flowers.