Snail ever so slowly climb Mt Fuji^[1] katatsuburi sorosoro nobore fuji no yama 蝸牛 そろそろ登れ 富士の山 issa 一茶

[1] The English above is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

The verse is an order spoken to a snail: climb Mount Fuji, the highest mountain in Japan, slowly, slowly. The earliest print we know of is from 1829, two years after Issa's death, in the collection his disciples published as his, and nothing printed with it says where or why it was written.

So each reader has brought a story of their own. A Japanese teachers' manual of 1908 set it among verses on starting from where you stand. A travel writer, writing of the Fuji climb in 1927, took it as advice on pace: breathe quietly, keep the pace very slow, put speed out of your mind. Asatarō Miyamori, translating it in 1932, read it as a lesson that diligence and perseverance can achieve a great thing. In 1934 the Zen teacher Iida Tōin read its slowly, slowly as keep the mind quiet and do not fuss, wrote that between one step and the next there is no distance, and noted that the Rinzai monk Nantenbō often brushed it. R. H. Blyth, in 1952, set aside the commentators' lesson of perseverance: If you are a snail, be a snail.

Issa is rooting for you, no matter how big your aspiration.