1803
.天の川都のうつけ泣やらん
ama [no] kawa miyako no utsuke naku yaran
Milky Way--
maybe the fools of Kyoto
are crying
Issa's phrase, "Heaven's River" (ama no kawa) refers to the Milky Way. The word utsuke can mean emptiness in general but also, more particularly, empty-headed people. Why is Issa poking fun at the people of the capital? Is it raining this night? The "capital" (miyako) was Kyoto in Issa's day. This is where the emperor and his court lived. Political and military power was centered in the Shogun's city of Edo, today's Tokyo.
Shinji Ogawa notes that yaran makes the verb ("cry") conjectural ("may be weeping"). He is also puzzled by this haiku.
Jean Cholley believes that Issa is alluding to the fact that refined poets of the court followed a tradition of composing repetitive and cliché poems about the Milky Way; En village de miséreux: Choix de poèmes de Kobayashi Issa (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 235, note 19.