Thinkers Timeline

Matsuo Bashō was a Japanese poet of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest master of haiku and one of the foundational figures in all of Japanese literature. He transformed haiku from a witty social pastime into a refined literary art form capable of profound spiritual and aesthetic depth. He was born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644 near Ueno in Iga Province (modern western Mie Prefecture). His father was a low-ranking samurai serving a local lord. Bashō later took the name Matsuo Chūemon Munefusa. As a young man he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, son of the local lord. Yoshitada shared his passion for poetry, and the two studied haikai together. Yoshitada died suddenly in 1666 when Bashō was about twenty-two. The grief-stricken Bashō left his samurai position and eventually made his way to Edo (modern Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. There he immersed himself in literary circles and by the 1670s had become a respected poet and teacher. In 1680 he withdrew from urban Edo to a small hut by a banana tree (bashō in Japanese), from which he took the poetic name by which he is now known. He took up the study of Zen Buddhism under the priest Butchō and adopted an increasingly ascetic life. From 1684 he began a series of long walking journeys across Japan, recorded in travel diaries that combined prose and haiku: Nozarashi Kikō (Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, 1684), Kashima Kikō (1687), Oi no Kobumi (Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1688), Sarashina Kikō (1688), and his masterpiece Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North, completed 1694). The last documented a 2,400-kilometre journey through northern Honshu in 1689 with his disciple Kawai Sora. He returned to Edo in 1691, set out again in 1694 for Kyushu, fell ill on the way, and died in Osaka on 28 November 1694. He was 50.