Snails, spiders, fleas, mosquitoes, flies – these were among the favorite subjects of the lay Buddhist priest, Kobayashi Issa, who lived from 1763-1828:
Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.
.
Don’t worry spiders,
I keep house
casually.
For you too fleas,
the night must be long
it must be lonely.
.
Mosquito at my ear.
Does it think
I’m deaf?
Come flies, have some rice.
May you too
enjoy a rich harvest.
I love these haiku that he wrote about little creatures. Because of Issa, I don’t just keep house casually; I keep it with a careful eye out for the smallest of sentient beings.
Like most haiku masters, Issa wrote poems about the seasons:
The holes in the wall
play the flute
this autumn evening. The rooster’s comb
droops listlessly…
winter rain My tumble-down house
just as it is…
spring begins. Stitching together
the short summer
singing frogs.
Issa did not have an easy life. He was born in a small village in central Japan, the son of a farmer. His mother died when he was two. He wrote this haiku about her:
Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean
every time…
His father remarried when Issa was eight, but his stepmother abused him so he left his small village in his late teens and went to the big city, Edo. There, he began to study haiku and donned monk’s robes. At age 27, he set out on ten years of wandering, a tradition with both Zen monks and haiku masters.
He returned to the village of his birth in 1801 when his father became ill. Issa composed this haiku as he nursed his father for a month before his death:
His sleeping form –
I shoo away the flies today.
There’s nothing more to do.
Following his father’s wishes, Issa married a local girl named Kiku. He was 51. She was 27. They had a son who lived only a month, another son who lived only a year, and a daughter who died of smallpox after only a year. All this time, Issa composed haiku and also wrote a piece of prose called, “A Year in My Life.” In it, he described the death of his daughter, ending the section with a haiku that I discuss in my book:
The world of dew
is the world of dew
and yet, and yet…
Kiku then died after giving birth to another son who did not live out the year. Issa married two more times before his death at the age of 64. As was the custom with Zen monks, he composed a death poem:
A bath when you’re born
A bath when you die.
Nonsense.
Let’s return to the snails, spiders, fleas, mosquitoes, and flies that Issa befriended and loved to write about. I am so moved by how this man, whose life was filled with so much tragedy, could write poems of such careful observation and joy.
Closing the door
he drops off to sleep…
snail.
Why
such careful consideration
snail?
All the baby spiders
scatter
to make a living.
On the moonlit spider web
an evening
cicada.
A flea jumps
in the laughing Buddha’s
mouth.
Evening –
in a big sake cup
moon and a flea.
My home
where I even exhale
mosquitoes.
To the lullaby
of mosquitoes
a child sleeps.
I’m going out
flies, so relax
make love.
The winter fly
I spare, the cat
snatches.
Don’t kill that fly!
Look – it’s wring it’s hands,
wringing its feet.
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