Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) was the Japanese poet who transformed and deepened an already sophisticated haikai tradition, lifting the hokku — the seventeen-sound-unit opening verse later called haiku — into a serious art of nature, season, and quiet attention. Working in the long peace of early Edo Japan, he gave the tiny form real depth, trained an influential school of followers in his shōfū style, and left travel diaries, above all Oku no Hosomichi, that braided prose and verse into a new kind of book.
In the spring of 1689 a frail poet in his forties gave away his house, said his goodbyes as though he might not come back, and set out on foot for the wild northern provinces of Japan. He walked roughly fifteen hundred miles over five months, sleeping in flea-bitten inns and mountain huts, half-expecting to die on the road. What the trip finally became was not a report but a slim book he shaped and revised for years afterward, weaving prose and verse so tightly that nothing quite like it had been read before. Bashō had already begun making the seventeen-on hokku, the form later called haiku, into something serious. On that road he made it lasting.