Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶, June 15, 1763 – January 5, 1828)[1] was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jōdo Shinshū.

When his grandmother died when he was 14, Issa felt estranged in his own house, a lonely, moody child who preferred to wander the fields.

After years of legal wrangles, Issa managed to secure rights to half of the property his father left.

His poetry makes liberal use of local dialects and conversational phrases, and 'including many verses on plants and the lower creatures.

Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures'.

[10] Issa's haiku were sometimes tender, but stand out most for their irreverence and wry humor, as illustrated in these verses translated by Robert Hass:[11] No doubt about it, the mountain cuckoo is a crybaby.

Issa, 'with his intense personality and vital language [and] shockingly impassioned verse...is usually considered a most conspicuous heretic to the orthodox Basho tradition'.

[15] His approach has been described as "similar to that of Sengai....Issa's sketches are valued for the extremity of their abbreviation, in keeping with the idea of haiku as a simplification of certain types of experience.

"[16] One of Issa's haiku, as translated by R.H. Blyth, appears in J. D. Salinger's 1961 novel, Franny and Zooey: (Katatsumuri sorosoro nobore Fuji no yama 蝸牛そろそろ登れ富士の山) The same poem, in Russian translation, served as an epigraph for a novel Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (published 1966–68), also providing the novel's title.

After a big fire swept through the post station of Kashiwabara on July 24, 1827, Issa lost his house and was forced to live in his kura (storehouse).