The German, English, and French text for the remainder incorporates six quotations: three haiku (by Shiki, Buson, and Issa), and one passage each from Socrates, the Gospel according to St. Thomas, and Meister Eckhart (Stockhausen 1979).
In his late haiku, 'we see Issa the old man - hundreds of years, thousands of years old, the Old Man of Edward Lear. That is our fate too. We have to die, to become nothing, in order to know the meaning of something'.
He once wrote a paper under a pseudonym derived from Kobayashi Issa, a famous Japanese haiku poet.
The same poem, in Russian translation, served as an epigraph for a novel Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (published 1966–68), also providing the novel's title.
Issa | Kobayashi Issa | Kenta Kobayashi | Takeru Kobayashi | Darrell Issa | Kobayashi Maru | Kiyoshi Kobayashi | Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi | Issa J. Boullata | Issa Hayatou | Yumiko Kobayashi | Takao Kobayashi | Satoru Kobayashi | Hiroshi Kobayashi | Abdullah Kobayashi | Yutaka Kobayashi (businessman) | Yutaka Kobayashi (announcer) | Yutaka Kobayashi | Shinji Kobayashi | Sachiko Kobayashi | Royal Kobayashi | Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber | Mao Kobayashi | Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad | Kuniaki Kobayashi | Kaoru Kobayashi (actor) | Kaoru Kobayashi | Issa Serge Coelo | Issa Boulos | Hideo Kobayashi |
Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828), one of the four great haiku masters of Japan, along with Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson and Masaoka Shiki, described the last days of his father in his diary, beginning when his father suddenly developed fever and became seriously ill and continuing until a week after his demise.