The Chanting Frog: Speciesism and the Possibility of Communication in Issa’s Haikus

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of animals, particularly frogs, in Kobayashi Nobuyuki (1763-1827), “Issa” ’s poetry from a perspective that identifies common and parallel threads in Anarchist, Shin Buddhist and Ecocritical thinking. The interrelationship between these three lines of thought is relevant to the frog poems of Issa, since they address the issue of speaking non-humans and dismantle power relations by following a particularly egalitarian interpretation of Buddhist thought. Issa’s Buddhist practice of listening de-centers the poet while empowering the frog as a speaking subject, and thus disrupts speciesist thinking. Issa’s vision is not only in consonance with a certain Buddhist worldview but can also be said to be anarchist, in so far as it conceives a fluid world without hierarchies or authority structures. These anarchist and Buddhist themes can shed some light on ongoing ecocritical discussions about non-human voice and agency.