Master of the Japanese haiku
An Edo-period Japanese poet, acknowledged as the supreme master of the haiku, that most minimal of verse forms. A haiku is only seventeen sounds, yet within that inch of space he could hold all of nature and a moment’s sudden insight. Fond of travel all his life, in his later years he journeyed on foot through the far north, writing the travel account The Narrow Road to the Deep North, distilling the scenes and Zen of the road into haiku after haiku. He raised the haiku from a word-game into a way of beholding the world.
Bashō’s most famous haiku is but a single line: "the old pond — a frog leaps in — the sound of water." A thousand-year silence of an old pond, broken by one frog’s leap and one splash, and then sunk into a deeper stillness still. With the fewest words he caught a fleeting instant, and spoke the essence of "sabi" in Japanese aesthetics — this is the power of the haiku.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.