Kobayashi issa biography for kids

Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶, 1763 – 1828) was aJapanese poet and lay Buddhist priest known for his haiku poems and journals. He was born in 1763 with the name Kobayashi Yatarô to a farmer and his wife in the village of Kashiwabara, a village of approximately one hundred houses in the highlands of the province of Shinano, close  to the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. He would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, raising buckwheat, rice, and other crops on the nearly two acres of family farmland, but a different destiny unfolded for him, following the death of his mother. His grandmother, Kana, reared him with deep affection until, when he was eight years of age, his father remarried. Although his stepmother, Hatsu, treated him well for two years, upon the birth of her first child, his step-brother Senroku, she relegated Issa to a role as a subordinate and began to abuse him, often physically. He has described in his memoirs how he was expected to look after this brother, often finding himself soaked in the child’s urine, and how he was punished when the baby was unhappy. Issa’s local schoolmaster, noticing the boy’s unhappiness, encouraged him to write haiku: With haiku you can show what you are feeling inside. His grandmother died when he w

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