19 Facts About Kobayashi Issa

Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jodo Shinshu.

Kobayashi Issa is known for his haiku poems and journals.

Kobayashi Issa endured the loss of his mother, who died when he was three.

Kobayashi Issa's death was the first of numerous difficulties young Issa suffered.

Kobayashi Issa was cared for by his grandmother, who doted on him, but his life changed again when his father remarried five years later.

When his grandmother died when he was 14, Kobayashi Issa felt estranged in his own house, a lonely, moody child who preferred to wander the fields.

Kobayashi Issa was sent to Edo by his father one year later to make out a living.

Kobayashi Issa's name was associated with Kobayashi Chikua of the Nirokuan haiku school, but their relationship is not clear.

Kobayashi Issa wrote a diary, now called Last Days of Issa's Father.

Kobayashi Issa returned to his native village at the age of 49 and soon took a wife, Kiku.

Kobayashi Issa married twice more late in his life, and through it all he produced a huge body of work.

Kobayashi Issa died on January 5,1828, in his native village.

Kobayashi Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku, which have won him readers up to the present day.

Kobayashi Issa's poetry makes liberal use of local dialects and conversational phrases, and 'including many verses on plants and the lower creatures.

Kobayashi Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures'.

Kobayashi Issa's haiku were sometimes tender, but stand out most for their irreverence and wry humor, as illustrated in these verses translated by Robert Hass:.

Kobayashi Issa's works include haibun such as Oraga Haru and Shichiban Nikki, and he collaborated on more than 250 renku.

Kobayashi Issa was known for his drawings, generally accompanying haiku: "the Buddhism of the haiku contrasts with the Zen of the sketch".

Kobayashi Issa's sketches are valued for the extremity of their abbreviation, in keeping with the idea of haiku as a simplification of certain types of experience.