Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827) was a Japanese Buddhist priest and one of the greatest masters of haiku poetry. He was born on June 15, 1763, in the village of Kashiwabara, in central Japan, the eldest son of a prosperous farming family. He lost his mother at the age of three, and after his father remarried, he developed a difficult relationship with his stepmother.
At the age of fourteen, Issa's grandmother, who had raised him, died. He was then forced to leave his family home and move to Edo (present-day Tokyo), where he worked at various jobs and studied under haiku masters. During the following years, he lived a wandering life, traveling through Japanese towns and Buddhist monasteries.
After his father's death, Issa returned to his hometown as a Buddhist priest and poet. There he became involved in a long legal dispute with his stepmother over his inheritance. Eventually, he secured half of his father's property, which eased his financial difficulties. He married at the age of forty-nine, but his life remained marked by tragedy. His first child died shortly after birth, and over the following years he lost two more children to illness.
Issa wrote more than 20,000 haiku, many of them expressing compassion for ordinary people, animals, and the hardships of life. He played a major role in renewing the art of haiku by giving it a more personal and emotional character. In addition to poetry, he also wrote prose works and diaries that are considered among the most important texts of nineteenth-century Japanese literature.
Kobayashi Issa died on November 19, 1827, in the house where he had been born. All of his children had died before him.
