The
above is an excerpt from my book, Pure Land Haiku: The Art of
Priest Issa (77-78). I was lucky to be able to include
these quotes from Nakamura Rikurô. During my first visit to Japan
in the summer of 1987, I found an old, musty copy of Nakamura's 1921
study of Kobayashi Issa in an equally old and musty Tokyo bookstore.
The preface of this book provides a glimpse into how Issa was perceived
by Japanese in the early 20th century. At the time, both Matuso Bashô and
Yosa Buson were universally acknowledged as "haiku masters," but
not Issa. In fact, as Nakamura notes, Issa himself most likely would
have rejected such nomenclature. The poet was, Nakamura writes, "an
ordinary man who humanly suffered and humanly prayed" [6]. In the popular
Japanese view, Bashô and Buson sit with stern
and lofty expressions in the high seats of haiku tradition, while
Issa, "Chief
Beggar of Shinano Province," stands in the crowd below, shoulder-to-shoulder
with ordinary people: human and approachable. Issa, I think, would
approve of this perception, since he forged it with the aggressive
persistence of a Hollywood publicist. This is not to say that
his poetic persona is false or not representative of the real man.
I am only suggesting
that we should keep in mind that our image of Issa is a consciously
designed literary construct. Slovenly, lazy, sinful, earthy, compassionate,
child-and-animal loving, unconcerned about appearances or public
rituals or worldly power ... such descriptors pop into our heads
when we think
of him because he deftly presented himself as such. Issa leaves
no doubt as to what he thinks about "important" people
who occupy this world's high seats:
oyabun to miete
j ôza ni naku kawazu
looks like boss
frog
in the high seat
croaking
While he certainly
admired and in some ways emulated "boss frog" Bashô,
Issa never placed himself in ethereal heights in his own
work. His vision is unpretentious, blunt, non-censoring and, often,
tongue-in-cheek,
as any random sampling of his many thousands of verses attests:
yamabuki ni burari
to ushi no fuguri kana
dangling in
the yellow roses
the bull's balls
akegata ya nebuka akari no nagashimoto
dawn--
the glint of leeks
in the sink
hatsu yuki ya furi ni mo kakurenu inu no kuso
the first snowfall
doesn't hide it...
dog poop
Another 20th century
Japanese critic of Issa, Fujimoto Jitsuya , wrote a 778-page study
that I happened upon
in the same musty Tokyo bookstore mentioned above. On one
of that book's deeply yellowed
pages, we find the words: "Issa, without
concern, makes poems about unsightly, unclean,
shameful things ... such topics seem neither
chopsticks nor
canes [i.e., they are good for nothing], yet
Issa encounters them with interest" (500).
As an example of a "dirty" (kitanai)
poem, Fujimoto cites:
shôben
no ana darake nari nokori yuki
riddled with piddle
the last
snow pile
A contemporary
Japanese haiku poet and scholar, Kaneko Tohta, agrees with Fujimoto,
noting that Issa captures
moments of everyday life
that Bashô and Buson did not consider
to be proper subject matter for poetry.
The following verse, according to Kaneko,
is one that Bashô and
Buson would never have written (228-29):
yûgao
no hana de hana kamu musume kana
blowing her snot
on the moonflower...
a young girl
Issa's down-to-earth
vision-a vision that I link in my book to Taoist
and Buddhist precedents-leads most
critics in
Japan to see
him as
less serious than Bashô or
Buson: more of a haiku jokester than
a haiku master. This appreciation
of Issa, however, is just as skewed
as the one put forth by biographical
critics obsessed with cataloguing
his sorrows (Ôshiki Zuike's
1984 study of the poet is titled, "The
Sorrow of Life"). Even Makoto
Ueda, one of Issa's champions among
today's haiku scholars, ends the
argument of his recent English-language
book, Dew on the Grass: The Life
and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, with
this somber summation: "To the
last days of his life Issa suffered
from a deep sense of his own unworthiness,
which was the basic source of his
creative energy throughout his career" (167).
Iconoclastic jokester, wounded
stepchild ... these are just two of many self-images projected by
Issa in the course of his writing.
To this list we might add: the restless traveler, the indolent napper
(while others toil in the fields), the sinner ambling
without concern down the
road to Hell,
the impoverished hermit,
the loving husband and father, the grieving
husband and father ... and
the list goes on. What many
critics miss is
the
fact that Issa, the creator
of these images, uses them metaphorically.
As I propose in my book,
I believe that his "carefully
crafted self-portraits reveal an Everyman
whose private joys and sorrows
broaden in relevance as they are
artistically transformed on the
page" (32). Yes,
he writes from real life, but his art transcends
autobiography.
chikazuki
no rakugaki miete aki no kure
friends of mine
scrawled on this wall...
autumn dusk
Biographically-minded
critics such as Ueda note that this verse appears in a haibun
describing a visit
to Zenkôji, the Pure Land Buddhist
Temple in Issa's home province, where
the poet happened upon some graffiti
signed, just
the previous day, by people from Nagasaki
whom he hadn't seen in years (143-44).
His recognition of his friends' writing,
grounded in real experience, inspires
a poem drenched with universal significance
and emotion that, in Wordsworth's phrase, "doth
lie too deep for tears." Here is
the sabi that Bashô advocated:
easy to miss if we don't take Issa seriously
or, just as bad, if we focus on his life
to the exclusion of seeing his art as
art. Nakamura Rikurô was
right. The phrase, "Master Issa," does sound
a bit too important to fit the "human" image
of Issa that the original Issa myth-maker
(Issa himself) puts forth. The poet of
poop, piddle and snot-leeks
and bull's balls-doesn't quite seem to
belong on the high, golden dais reserved
for masters. If posterity puts him there,
Issa will probably, frog-like, hop down
to rejoin the crowd below. Perhaps this
is the final test of the true "master" of
haiku: he eschews the very term to mingle
on equal terms with his fellow creatures,
human and nonhuman. He records his experiences
and theirs with the kind of immediacy and
honesty that were unknown in haiku before
he came along.
hana saku ya me
wo nuwaretaru tori no naku
cherry blossoms--
chickens with eyes stitched shut
are clucking
Jean Cholley notes
that in the poultry market in the Muromachi district of Edo (today's
Tokyo),
the eyes of the doomed birds
were sewn shut to keep them immobile
while being fattened in their cages (237). Issa sketches this not-pretty scene
with blunt honesty. And though he utters no emotional words, one feels his
heart going out to the birds who cannot see, and never again
will see, the cherry blossoms.
Some readers might slap Fujimoto's kitanai ("dirty") label on such
a haiku. But this world we live in is, in fact, dirty, messy, contradictory;
monstrous cruelty and breath-taking beauty arise side-by-side every day. Into
this everyday world Issa plunges. The Edo-period
haiku poet who named himself Issa doesn't need me or anyone
to defend him. His work can do his
talking for him, and it holds up. One subscriber
to my "Issa Haiku-a-Day" service, in which a randomly chosen haiku
is emailed every twenty-four hours, wrote recently, "This is so contemporary.
It might have been written today!" Actually, my Internet friend has
it backwards: Issa does not write like contemporary haiku poets; contemporary
haiku poets,
the best of them, write like Issa.
Works Cited Cholley,
Jean. En village de miséreux: Choix de poèmes
de Kobayashi Issa. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Fujimoto
Jitsuya. Issa no kenkyû. Tokyo: Meiwa Insatsu,
1949. Kaneko
Tohta. Issa kushû. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1983;
rpt. 1984. Kobayashi
Issa. Issa zenshû. Nagano: Shinano Mainichi
Shimbunsha, 1976-79.
9 volumes. Lanoue,
David G. Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa. Reno/Tadoshi:
Buddhist Books International,
2004. _____________. "Issa:
Haiku-a-Day." [http://www.xula.edu/cat/issa/] Nakamura
Rikurô. Issa senshû. Kyoto: Kyoto Insatsusha,
1921; rpt. 1930. Ô shiki Zuike. Jinsei
no hiai: Kobayashi Issa. Tokyo: Shintensha,
1984. Ueda, Makoto.
Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa.
Leiden/Boston:
Brill, 2004.
 Born
in Omaha, Nebraska, David Lanoue earned his BA
at Creighton University (1976) and his MA and PhD
in English
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (1977, 1981). He is presently
a professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana in
New Orleans.
From
1984 on, he has published original haiku, translations,
and haiku-related essays in various magazines and
anthologies—including Modern Haiku and Frogpond.
He
conducted research in Japan in 1987 and 1988, and
participated in
the N.E.H. Literary Translation Institute at the University
of California, Santa Cruz in 1989. The result of this labor
was his book, Issa: Cup-of-Tea Poems; Selected Haiku of Kobayashi
Issa (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1991).
Additional
publications include Haiku Guy (Red Moon
Press 2000), a novel about haiku, life, love, and
mad,
moonstruck poets, and Pure Land Haiku: The
Art of Priest Issa.
Online
Essays:
"Confessions of a Translator-Part 1," in World Haiku
Review 1.1, May 2001
"Issa's Comic Vision," in Haijinx I.2, Summer Solstice 2001
"Confessions of a Translator-Part 2," in World Haiku Review 1.2, August 2001
"A Little Help From My Friends," in World Haiku Review 1.3,
November 2001
"From Translation to Creation," in World Haiku Review 2.1,
March 2002
"Random Clicks" in World Haiku Review 2.2, August 2002
"Treasures from Issa," in World Haiku Review 2.3, November
2002
"Issa's Haiku Lessons," in World Haiku Review 3.1,
March 2003
"Not Your Ordinary Saint: Jizô in the Haiku of Issa," in
World Haiku Review 3.2, December 2003
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