Snail on the Slope of Fuji

Issa was one of the first to begin deviating from the traditional canons of Japanese poetry, incorporating his personal observations and feelings into his poems. For him, the main goal was always to capture the surrounding reality with maximum precision and... to find beauty in familiar and mundane things, usually completely ignored by his predecessors. And thanks to the fact that Issa wrote about his own experiences, his lines allow us not only to see the beauty of the world but also to glimpse the person hiding behind the triplet verses. This edition includes the best haiku by Issa, as well as excerpts from the prose book “My Spring” and the diary “The Last Days of My Father” — touching and poignant chronicles narrating how Issa cared for his dying seriously ill father. The hokku “Quietly, quietly crawl, / Snail, down the slope of Fuji” gave its name to the famous novella by the Strugatsky brothers “Snail on the Slope”.