This book sketches the life and poetry of Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), a Japanese poet popularly known as one of the Three Pillars of Haiku. While Basho with his mystic asceticism and Buson with his romantic aestheticism immeasurably enriched the haiku tradition, it was Issa who, with his bold individualism and all-embracing humanism, helped to modernize the form to a degree matched by no other poet. Based on the most recent scholarship, the book attempts to identify the sources of his originality in terms of his long checkered life. It traces his growth and maturity by examining his motherless childhood, struggling youth in Edo, wanderings in western Japan, restless existence as a haiku master, return home to Kashiwabara, three brief marriages, and last years as an old poet.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Issa We Never Knew Ye,
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This review is from: Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa (Brill's Japanese Studies Library) (Hardcover)
This book is *the* essential book on Issa for English readers, and for Japanese who read English as well. Debunking a great deal of the myth (some of which Issa seems directly responsible for), this book gives a straightforward overview of the poet's life and the development of his haiku. Showing that although he did indeed have a difficult childhood and youth, Issa gained serious recognition and financial security in his middle years, even returning to his childhood home as a modestly comfortable landowner. It also takes up the forces bearing on his development as a poet, including the haiku hierarchy of his time and the effects of this and of religion and personal tragedy late in life on his changing poetics. The plentiful translations, of haiku, a complete linked poem, and a number of short prose pieces, are well done and worth the price of admission.
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