Basho

=Matsuo Basho= By: Ben Trouvais

Life of Basho
Matsuo Basho was born in 1644 as Matsuo Kinsaku. It is said that Basho was born near Ueno in the Iga Provinence of Japan, although many people speculate he was born elswhere. His father was said to be a low-ranking samurai. As a result, Basho was automatically thrown into a military life style, although it didn't promise him a rich life. In his early years, it was said that Basho worked as a servant to Todo Yoshitada, where he picked up a form of poetry known as haikai no renga, which he would refine later to the poetry form of haiku which we know today. Over time, Basho's work gained popularity,especially with the Shoguns which Basho was familiar. Basho created many poetic works over the course of 22 years, many of which are still popular and being read today. In the summer of 1694, Basho made his final journey where he died in Osaka on November 28th, 1694 at the age of 50.

Oku no Hosomichi
Basho's most famous work is widely accepted as Oku no Hosomichi, or The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The story is a travel record Basho wrote himself when he took a massive trip in the spring of 1694. Basho walked from his home in Edo to the northern area of Japan, known today as Honshu, and then back around. The goal of his trip was to visit the places that poets before him had wrote about to help him in advancing his poetic techniques. The book itself is a combonation of a journal and several haiku poems that Basho had wrote while on the journey. It took years of revising after to make the book publishable to Japan and the rest of the world.

Impact on Society
Basho has impacted the society of Japan and the world in more ways than one. Basho introduced haiku to the world as a form of poetry, allowing many authors and poets after him to use the writing style. Basho also had a much larger imapct on society as a whole. Basho showed people how the world was through the eyes of a poet. He represented things in the natural world to support his ideas about life and how one should live their life. Basho introduced this new way of thinking about the world that many poets after him tried to follow. Since the publication of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho's classic stories and poems have inspired a countless number of people in showing them not only how to look at the world around them, but also how their lives connected to the world and how they should respect and embrace this.