The Year of My Life, Second Edition: A Translation of Issa's Oraga Haru

By Nobuyuki Yuasa

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520329058

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THE YEAR OF MY LIFE

THE YEAR OF MY LIFE

A Translation of Issa's

Oraga Haru

BY NOBUYUKI YUASA

Second Edition

University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1960,1972 by the Regents of the University of California Second Edition, 1972

ISBN: O-52O-O2328-5 (cloth) 0-520-02160-6 (paper)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9651 Designed by Rita Carroll Printed in the United States of America

To my father and my mother

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Ten years have passed since the publication of this book. During this period, I had occasion to translate Basho, and the experience has led me to revise a considerable part of this book. I have corrected a few mistakes I committed in the first edition, changed my reading at several places, and added a few footnotes to facilitate understanding, but my main effort has been directed to doing greater justice to the poetry of Issa. His poems are not so simple as they often seem on the surface, and I have done my best to convey various levels of his meaning. I have also reinforced the use of colloquialism and the descriptive quality of the translation, and at the same time tried to maintain some regularity in line lengths. In preparing this revised edition, I have been aided by a number of friends, but my thanks are due especially to Mr. Philip T. Cockle and Mr. Leslie Pearsall, both instructors of Hiroshima University at one time.

N. Y.

October 1971

PREFACE

To bridge the Pacific mechanically is a task that today’s engineers have not quite accomplished. To do the same politically is of paramount interest and importance to all people of the world. But to bridge the Pacific culturally is far more difficult than either of these, and only in recent years have attempts been made in this direction. I am not at all certain that my translation of this little book of haiku ‘will serve this purpose, but if it should by chance bring the two coasts of the Pacific any closer together, I should be very happy.

I owe a special debt of thanks to Josephine Miles. The present work was begun at her suggestion when I was a student at the University of California under the Fulbright exchange program, and without her constant encouragement and advice, I should never have been able to finish it.

I am also greatly indebted to Seth P. Ulman, Fulbright Professor, Waseda University, Tokyo, 1956—1958. He read the manuscript several times, not only making red-pencil corrections here and there, but also rewriting sections of it. Without his assistance, the book would never have taken its present form.

My thanks are due also to Henry Nash Smith, Way ne Shumaker, Charles S. Muscatine Mark Harris, William A. White, and other teachers and friends who read the manuscript and gave valuable suggestions.

My debt to Japanese scholars and editors of Issa is too great to record here. I should like, however, to mention specially the following three books-. the facsimile edition of Issa’s manuscript (Haikiji Issa Shinseki Oraga Haru Kōhon) published in 1925, which contains the Japanese characters used on the cover and frontis-piece; Seisensui Ogiwara’s edition of Oraga Haru in the Iwa- nami Pocket Book Series, from which Issa’s drawings have been reproduced through courtesy of the publisher; and Tsuyu Kawashima’s fully annotated edition (Oraga Haru Shinkai), to which I owe the interpretation of difficult passages. I am also indebted to Akira Okamoto, Tadao Doi, Kaken Narusawa, Jiro Ogawa, and Michio Masui, all of Hiroshima University, for suggestions and aids. .

Finally, I want to thank the editors of the University of California Press for their cooperation.

N.Y.

Hiroshima, 1959

INTRODUCTION

Issa, whose real name was Yatarō Kobayashi, was born in the small mountain village of Kashiwabara in the province of Shinano (now called Nagano prefecture, central Japan) in 1763. He was the first son in a middleclass farm family. His father, Yagohei, is said to have had a taste for haiku, and left a fairly good specimen of the form behind him at the time of his death, as we shall presently see. In 1765, when Yatarō was only a little over two, his mother died. This unfortunate loss was destined to cast ever deepening shadows over the mind of the child. He testifies to the power of her memory in the following poem written in later life:

Whenever I come To see the ocean, There is my mother’s Beloved face.

After his mother’s death, the boy was cared for by his grandmother, of whom he wrote appreciatively in later years:

She never complained of my dirty diapers, and carried me day and night on her back or in her arms. She begged milk to feed me. She borrowed medicine from the neighbors to make me well when I was sick. Since I was merely a child at the time, I was completely unaware of all that hardship, and shot up like a regular bamboo sprout.

When Yatarō was old enough, he was occasionally sent to the house of Rokuzaemon Nakamura, in the same village, to learn reading and writing. Rokuzaemon was a haiku poet (he wrote under the pen name of Shimpo), and it is probable that the boy received a good basic introduction to this traditional Japanese form of poetry under his tutelage.

This happy life, however, did not last long. In 1770, his father was married for the second time—to a woman named Satsu; and thus began what was to prove a long and bitter struggle between Yatarō and his stepmother. Issa has commented on his child’s sense of grievance in the following passage:

When I was ten,