Kobayashi Issa, pen name Issa, was a “Japanese haiku poet whose works in simple, unadorned language captured the spiritual loneliness of the common man,” (Britannica, Issa). He was sent away to Edo by his father because he had an extremely poor relationship with his stepmother. There, he studied under a poet named “Nirokuan Chikua.” He then, like many other greats (Basho, Buson, Masaoki) began traveling around Japan under the sobriquet Issa. He had already published his first work “Tabishui,” before he made this journey. Tragedy struck Issa when a “inheritance feud erupted,” between him and the stepmother he detests (Britannica, Issa). Once it had been resolved he moved back to his native town of “Kashiwabara in the Shinano province of Japan,” (Summers). There he married for the first time and his four children died when they were just infants as well as his wife during childbirth. A second marriage failed and he wasn’t around long enough to see his third wife give birth to a girl. This tragic life of his gave him inspiration and ideas to write some of the haiku poems that he wrote.
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