The bitter part eaten by the mother mountain persimmon shibui toko haha ga kui keri yama no kaki 澁いとこ 母が喰ひけり 山の柿 issa 一茶

A Japanese school's book for parents, in 1935, read the verse as a picture of a mother's care: wild persimmons are chancy, so she tastes first and gives her child the sweet part. In our reading that is the verse's surface, and beneath it the mother does not give anything up: she simply eats the astringent part. Read with Kobayashi Issa's own life, the verse becomes one of longing. He lost his mother at three and from eight was raised by a stepmother, who, a 1921 account says, treated him badly. The mother here may be one he watched other children have.

The word 澁い means astringent, the tannin in a persimmon that dries the mouth. The title's bitter is the looser word for it. Our English keeps the Japanese order, so the mother's part comes first and the persimmons come last. The semi-cursive designs write the first character as 渋, its modern form, where old printings have 澁. One design writes most of the verse in kana.

The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

The verse is Issa's, set down in his verse diary under the year 1820; the diary is known from a copy its 1946 editor dates to 1851 by its colophon, printed in 1927, the year it was found, and the verse was already in print in a collected edition of 1902.