1813

春雨や鼠のなめる角田川
harusame ya nezumi no nameru sumida-gawa

spring rain--
a mouse licking up
Sumida River

1813

春風や鼠のなめる角田川
haru kaze ya nezumi no nameru sumida-gawa

spring breeze--
a mouse licking up
Sumida River

In Makoto Ueda's translation, a rat is "feeding by" the river. He believes that the rat is not drinking water but is eating something in the water; Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004) 96-97.

I disagree. I see the haiku as a vision of contrasts: tiny mouse drinking the great river. It has the same tone and resonance, for me, as Issa's image, in another haiku, of a little snail climbing Mount Fuji.

http://haikuguy.com/issa/queryallcodetest4.php?keywords=mouse&year=

Elucidations ~

From David Lanoue’s incomplete archive we can infer Issa has written at least 31 haiku with mouse as a word in it. But these two Haiku are perhaps the most famous ”Mouse Haiku” by Kobayashi Issa .

Spring rain [春雨 harusame]  the kigo announces the space-time aesthetic mood and all that one needs to know, before the surprise words, “a mouse licking up / Sumida river “ makes a remarkable closure, with a classical version of a wild twist, a hineri !

The simplest association and contrast of images suggests that this is almost a shasei Haiku with “karumi” [ the intrinsic beauty of a great(ordinary) Zen moment ] . Further, the association of a flowing river Sumida with a tiny mouse in spring suggests a certain “aware” ( eternal transience of things big and small in the Cosmic Flow of Maha Kaala Chakra [ The Grear Wheel Of Time.] This transience also indirectly invokes the solitude and rituals of wabi-sabi. This is specially relevant since Issa was a Pure Land Buddhist by faith and inclination. 

 But there is another aspect too. The very act of imagination plays a great role in these two Haiku.  The vast vision of  the little mouse licking up the great Sumida river had arrested Issa so much that he wrote two Haiku almost one after another with just the first line changed from “spring rain [春雨 harusame]  “ to “ spring breeze [  春風 haru kaze ] “ and the rest retained identically.

One can legitimately surmise that Issa saw a mouse  near the Sumida river either licking the river Sumida or wandering near the river. Issa with his childlike imagination stretches the situation, gives the tiny mouse tremendous impossible thirst to drink up the whole Sumida river and draws our mind to a metaphysical cosmos where such impossibilities become seamless possibilities

This impossible surreal haiku is a seed for many tales, parables and even little epics if one may venture to wander with an infinite mind ~ one can imagine various impossible things happening,  like the mouse here ( big becoming small and vice-versa in Swiftian meta geometric cosmoses ) and conjure various vague and amusing and even hilarious world visions erupting in innocent glee from this unique yet crazy possibility envisioned by Issa ~ By this process an astonishing “yugen” concealed in these words finds light in our being in its own unique way in each distinct reader .  The role of the reader as an active participant is inevitably enhanced by the vast gardens these simple seed-words suggest. Word is a Revelation and Vision when used legitimately with Truth, the Rtam,. as Issa demonstrates here innocently we may say tentatively.

Among all the great Haijin(s) Issa perhaps was the most childlike and accessible: but yet that does not diminish the stupendous achievement of this poor old man who aged too early leaving behind a monumental corpus of Haiku!  

These two Haiku may be shown as  classic examples of haiku, to show depth, beauty, vision and also the kigo and the appropriate kireji implicit in the Haiku.