我と来て遊べや 親のない雀 ware to kite asobe ya oya no nai suzume Come and play with me, sparrow with no parent

Word for word: 我と来て, come with me; 遊べや, play!; 親のない雀, sparrow with no parent. 遊べ is play! said to someone, and や is the particle that calls to them. 親 is a parent, a father or a mother.

雀 is the sparrow, the common bird of houses and fields. The young sparrow, 雀の子, is a season word of spring, and Issa files this verse in spring. The verse itself says 雀, the sparrow.

The other children, Issa writes in 『おらが春』, would sing at him: A child with no parent shows it anywhere: he stands at the gate chewing his nails. I kept away from them, he writes, and crouched the long day in the shade of the wood and thatch piled in the back field.

Issa's mother died when he was three, and a stepmother came in his eighth year, counting ages the Japanese way, one at birth. His father lived until 1801.

In 1926 a writer on Issa pointed to Issa's diary, where the verse stands with no age and not one character of headnote. He found it took no effort to read it as a recollection of the time when Issa was six. The same year an editor of Issa's texts, citing Issa's manuscript of 『おらが春』, found it not at all unnatural as a six-year-old's chance verse.

In English the verse came with stories of its own. Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1902, joined it to the death of Issa's mother. Harold G. Henderson, in 1934, told of a village festival and a forlorn fledgling, under the words The story goes. Henderson's festival and fledgling are in no Japanese source our history read.

Our history reads the verse as a recollection, made by Issa in his fifties and set in 『おらが春』 inside a childhood he was writing down. It signs that as a reading: nothing it read proves that no child said it.

The children sang a child with no parent at Issa, and the verse gives the same words to a sparrow, with an invitation where the song had a taunt. In at least three of the other forms, the sparrow comes and plays; in the form on this scroll, it is asked to come.

Whether you take it as a child's verse or as a grown man's memory of being that child is yours.

A hokku by Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶 (1763–1828), first found in his diary 『七番日記』 in the first month of 1814 with no headnote and no age; on a sheet for 夏目成美, which its editor dated to the same year, he headed it 八才の時, when I was eight; in 『おらが春』 (1819) he set it after a prose account of his lonely childhood, as an invitation, signed 六才 弥太郎, Yatarō, six; a fair copy its editor judged late has 八ヽ時, which he reads as perhaps when I was eight.