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Kobayashi Issa (1762-1826)

Kobayashi Issa, born Kobayashi Yataro, is known as one of the great masters of haiku and is renowned for portraying the minute enjoyments of life in his poetry. This is remarkable considering that from the time Issa was born, in 1763 in the small village of Kashiwabara, he endured hardship after hardship. At a young age, Issa's mother passed away and Issa was left with a stepmother who often beat him. He lived through poverty, saw his children die, and found only more unhappiness in later life. Issa started writing haiku early on, as a kind of escape from his everyday drudgery, under a local poet named Shimpo. At fourteen, Issa was sent to Edo by his father to study with the haiku poets Mizoguchi Sogan and Moroccan Chikua. His work dealt with the everyday lives of Shinsho peasants. Issa's haiku are often more personal and consoling than those of Basho and Buson's. They portrayed the most vulnerable aspects of the poet and caught the consideration of Seibi Natsume, who became his benefactor. Over the years, Issa had taken the pen names of 'Kobayashi Ikyo' and 'Nirokuan Kikumei,' finally settling on Issa in 1792. His noted collection of haiku entitled Tabishui was published in 1795, along with collections that recounted his travels entitled Chichi No Shuen Nikki in 1801, Kyowakujo in 1803, Shichiban-Nikki in 1810, and Waga Harushu in 1811.

Issa's family troubles, even after the death of his father from typhoid fever, led him to take residence in various locations such as Kyoto, Osaka, Nagasaki and Matsuyama. Issa finally returned to Kashiwabara in 1812 after settling a long dispute with his step family over his inheritance of his father's property. He married and published Diary of the Death of My Father. By 1823, Issa had lost all of his children, his wife, and his property but gained the reputation of leader of the haiku form in the Shinsho province. He published Hachiban-Nikki in 1818, Oragaharu in 1819, and Kuban Nikki in 1822. His easily relatable poetry was widely read and appreciated. Despite his misfortunes, Issa's style was often humorous and playful and his subjects included fleas, frogs and sparrows. He remarried in 1823 but his wife left him after a few short weeks. He married for the third time in 1826 and died in 1827, shortly before the birth of a baby girl.

Issa was the last of the great masters of haiku before the reform of Masaoka Shiki. He left over 20,000 haikus that are read to this day.